The Statistical Analysis of Characteristics of Coronal Mass Ejection During the Descending Phase of Solar Cycle 23 and 24

The characteristics of CMEs we studied are angular width, linear speed, and acceleration for all categories of CMEs such as narrow (W ≤20°), intermediate (20°< W<200°), wide (W ≥ 200°) and linear speed <500 km/s during the descending phase of solar cycle 23 and 24 and compared them. We have found that there are 1951 narrow CMEs during solar cycle 23 that is 1.9 times greater than in solar cycle 24 (1047). On the other side, the number of intermediate CMEs during solar cycle 24 (1571) is 1.14 times more than solar cycle 23 (1162). We observed no noticeable difference between the number of wide CMEs of solar cycle 23 (29) and 24 (36). The angular width of CMEs during the descending phase of solar cycle 23 and solar cycle 24, predominately distributed around 100-600. The fascinating result is that the angular width distributions for the descending phase of solar cycles are approximately identical. On comparing the results of linear speed of both solar cycle, we can say that, (i) 93.7% (1729) and 87.7% (908) of narrow CMEs, (ii) 97% (1328) and 94% (1479) of intermediate CMEs and (iii) 44% (13) and 42% (15) of wide CMEs have speed of <500 km s-1, respectively. Mostly the fractions of narrow and intermediate CMEs decline sharply at the speeds greater than 500 km s-1. The maximum speed observed during the 23rd cycle is 1994 km/s (wide CME) and the 24th cycle is 3163 km/s (wide CME) respectively. It was noticed that the speed of the 24th solar cycle CME is higher than the 23rd solar cycle CME. The major fraction of CMEs has acceleration in the range of -20 to 20 km s-2, all types of CMEs. The narrow and intermediate CMEs mostly show acceleration while wide CMEs show deceleration.

Analytical Study of Severe and Great Geomagnetic Storms

Severe and Great Geomagnetic storms are considered to be those which have Dst less than -200nT. The investigation years are January 1996 to December 2006, which refers to 23rd solar cycle. During this period, 18 Geomagnetic storms are observed. When there are maximum number of sunspots present at the solar disk, highest number of these Geomagnetic storms are observed, which is quite obvious. The Coronal Mass Ejections responsible for these storms depict latitudinal as well as longitudinal bias showing more inclination towards northern hemisphere and western region of the solar disk. These Coronal Mass Ejections are confined between 25 of the equator.

On the Solar Cycle Variation of the Solar Diurnal Anisotropy of Multi-TeV Cosmic-ray Intensity Observed with the Tibet Air Shower Array

We analyze the temporal variation of the solar diurnal anisotropy of the multi-TeV cosmic-ray intensity observed with the Tibet air shower array from 2000 to 2009, covering the maximum and minimum of the 23rd solar cycle. We comfirm that a remarkable additional anisotropy component is superposed on the Compton-Getting anisotropy at 4.0 TeV, while its amplitude decreases at higher energy regions. In constrast to the additional anisotropy reported by the Matsushiro experiment at 0.6 TeV, we find the residual component measured by Tibet at multi-TeV energies is consistent with being stable, with a fairly constant amplitude of 0.041% ± 0.003% and a phase at around 07.17 ± 00.16 local solar time at 4.0 TeV. This suggests the additional anisotropy observed by the Tibet experiment could result from mechanisms unrelated to solar activities.

Studies on Longer Wavelength Type II Radio Bursts Associated with Flares and CMEs during the Rise and Decay Phase of 23rd Solar Cycle

A statistical study on the properties of CMEs and flares associated with DH-type II bursts in the 23rd solar cycle during the period 1997–2008 is carried out. A sample of 229 events from our recent work is used for the present study (Vasanth and Umapathy, 2013). The collected events are divided into two groups as (i) solar cycle rise phase events and (ii) solar cycle decay phase events. The properties of CMEs in the two groups were compared and the results are presented. It is noted that there is no difference in the properties of type II burst like start frequency and end frequency between the solar cycle rise phase events and decay phase events. The mean CME speed of solar cycle decay phase events (1373 km s−1) is slightly higher than the solar cycle rise phase events (1058 km s−1). The mean CME acceleration of solar cycle decay phase events (−15.18 m s−2) is found to be higher than that of the solar cycle rise phase events (−1.32 m s−2). There exists good correlation between (i) CME speed and width and (ii) CME speed and acceleration for solar cycle decay phase events (R=0.79, R=-0.80) compared to solar cycle rise phase events (R=0.60, R=-0.57). These results indicate that the type II bursts parameters do not depend upon the time of appearance in the solar cycle.