Cornell University ECE 586 Upper Atmospheric Physics II Spring 2007

This is the home page for ECE 586, in which we seek to understand the physics of the Sun, solar wind, and Earth's magnetosphere.
The course instructor for Spring 2007 is Steve Lantz, senior research associate at the Cornell Theory Center.

Lecture Materials and Course Overview

• Week 1:
  • notes from first lecture
  • slides from second lecture (ppt, pdf)
  • p-p chain reactions, how the Sun produces most of its nuclear energy
  • flows observed on the Sun's surface via Doppler techniques (link to NASA-MSFC)
  • many neat resources on the Sun can be found at this NASA-GSFC website
• Week 2:
  • equations of stellar structure
  • illustrations of how the magnetic field changes during a solar cycle
  • notes on instability to thermal convection and mixing length theory
  • Bonus links: Wikipedia articles on Maxwell relations, Triple product rule
  • scales of convection on the Sun
• Weeks 3-4:
  • basic hydrodynamics and MHD theory from in-class notes
  • applications to solar physics: magnetoconvection, dynamo theory
  • Chaps. 2 and 3 in Kivelson & Russell
• Weeks 5-6:
  • Sweet-Parker mechanism for magnetic reconnection
  • Alfvén waves
  • applications to the coronal heating problem
• Week 7:
  • enhanced magnetic reconnection and coronal heating
  • coronal magnetic structures, solar flares, prominences/filaments
  • Chap. 3 in Kivelson & Russell
• Spring Break
• Weeks 8-9:
  • solar wind
  • Chap. 4 in Kivelson & Russell
• Week 10:
  • collisionless shocks
  • Earth's bow shock and magnetosheath
  • Chap. 5 in Kivelson & Russell
• Week 11:
  • magnetosphere and magnetopause
  • Chaps. 6 and 9 in Kivelson & Russell
• Week 12:
  • magnetotail, polar cap convection
  • Chap. 9 in Kivelson & Russell
  • movie of how the magnetosphere responds to the dynamic solar wind
    (from a simulation - notice how the aurora lights up when B_z turns southward)
  • movie by Ogino showing a simulated plasmoid ejection from the Earth's magnetotail.
    "The IMF rotates counterclockwise as viewed from the sun with a period of 6 hours."
    This is why the FTE kicks in on the dusk (y>0) side.
    The movie was animation 2-4 on this Nagoya research page; it can still be found online.
    Conversion command: ffmpeg -i zz22fcd.mov -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -vf scale=480:-2 zz22fcd.mp4
    Other movies on this page were converted from .mov to .mp4 by the VLC media player.
  • movie by Østgaard illustrating a cusp aurora due to reconnection at high latitude.
    "The aurora you see is real data from IMAGE." (quote and a link to the movie is on Østgaard's research page)
• Week 13:
  • current systems, ionospheric coupling
  • Chap. 10 in Kivelson & Russell, Chap. 8 in Kelley (2nd ed.)

Final Report Ideas

• Solar origin and structure of magnetic storms
• Magnetic substorms: what are they?
• The national space weather program of the U.S. (or another country)
• Vulnerability of satellites to "killer electrons"
• Geospace observations and effects of a particular magnetic storm
• WWW search for data on a noteworthy space weather event
• Report on research on progress in an upper-atmospheric topic of interest to you

Subjects of Past Reports - 1998

• Wavelet analysis of equatorial spread F
• Space weather effects on the Northeastern power grid
• Voltage between rocket-borne probes in an E-region sporadic atom layer
• Fast, Rm-independent magnetic reconnection
• Auroral electrojet and types of irregularities
• Total electron content (TEC) of the ionosphere via dual-frequency GPS receivers
• Spacecraft vulnerability to space weather and mitigation against charging