| Description: The green surface is the Heliospheric Current Sheet (HCS). Earth and
its orbit are blue, Mars is red, Venus is yellow. The Sun is either blue or red,
depending upon whether you are in a toward or away sector (described in the next
paragraph). Use the VRML console to zoom, rotate, pan, etc. Click on the Sun
to see a close-up of the solar source surface. Put the mouse on the green words (you
can drag them to the side). You can then turn off/on the data, the grid, equatorial
plane, etc. Click on prev/next to bring up an earlier/later day's HCS.
We generate 3-D displays of the HCS daily. The HCS is a
surface separating the sunward (toward) and anti-sunward (away) directed interplanetary
magnetic field (IMF). In the ecliptic plane, the boundary separating the toward and
away directed IMF is called the sector boundary. Geomagnetic storms often occur as
sector boundary sweeps past the Earth. The HCS is the three dimensional extension of
sector boundaries. Early researchers hypothesized the HCS would take the shape of a
ballerina skirt.
We model the solar wind and IMF using the Hakamada-Akasofu-Fry (HAF) solar wind
model. We also provide real-time
space weather forecasts as soon as possible following significant solar events.
Source surface maps:
Blue represents negative magnetic field (points toward the Sun).
Red represents areas of positive (or away) fields. Click on the sphere to see
the original source surface map.
We obtain daily solar source surface maps from the NOAA/SEC Rapid Prototyping Center (Arge
and Pizzo, J. Geophys. Res., 105, pp. 10,465-10,479, 2000). These maps
provide the boundary conditions for HAF to compute the ambient, inhomogeneous background
solar wind conditions. We also compute source surface maps using Hakamada's
technique (K. Hakamada, Solar Phys., 159, pp. 89-96, 1995). |
