This gives a whole new meaning to “Total Solar Irradiance”. Instead of TSI, perhaps we should call the energy transfer that comes from the sun to the earth TSE for “Total Solar Energy” so that it includes the solar wind, the geomagnetics, and other yet undiscovered linkages. Jack Eddy is smiling and holding up the patch cord he’s been given at last, wondering how long it will be before we find all the connectors.
Scientists discover surprise in Earth’s upper atmosphere
From the UCLA Newsroom: By Stuart Wolpert
UCLA atmospheric scientists have discovered a previously unknown basic mode of energy transfer from the solar wind to the Earth’s magnetosphere. The research, federally funded by the National Science Foundation, could improve the safety and reliability of spacecraft that operate in the upper atmosphere.
“It’s like something else is heating the atmosphere besides the sun. This discovery is like finding it got hotter when the sun went down,” said Larry Lyons, UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and a co-author of the research, which is in press in two companion papers in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
The sun, in addition to emitting radiation, emits a stream of ionized particles called the solar wind that affects the Earth and other planets in the solar system. The solar wind, which carries the particles from the sun’s magnetic field, known as the interplanetary magnetic field, takes about three or four days to reach the Earth. When the charged electrical particles approach the Earth, they carve out a highly magnetized region — the magnetosphere — which surrounds and protects the Earth.
Charged particles carry currents, which cause significant modifications in the Earth’s magnetosphere. This region is where communications spacecraft operate and where the energy releases in space known as substorms wreak havoc on satellites, power grids and communications systems.
The rate at which the solar wind transfers energy to the magnetosphere can vary widely, but what determines the rate of energy transfer is unclear.
“We thought it was known, but we came up with a major surprise,” said Lyons, who conducted the research with Heejeong Kim, an assistant researcher in the UCLA Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, and other colleagues.
“This is where everything gets started,” Lyons said. “Any important variations in the magnetosphere occur because there is a transfer of energy from the solar wind to the particles in the magnetosphere. The first critical step is to understand how the energy gets transferred from the solar wind to the magnetosphere.”
The interplanetary magnetic field fluctuates greatly in magnitude and direction.
“We all have thought for our entire careers — I learned it as a graduate student — that this energy transfer rate is primarily controlled by the direction of the interplanetary magnetic field,” Lyons said. “The closer to southward-pointing the magnetic field is, the stronger the energy transfer rate is, and the stronger the magnetic field is in that direction. If it is both southward and big, the energy transfer rate is even bigger.”
However, Lyons, Kim and their colleagues analyzed radar data that measure the strength of the interaction by measuring flows in the ionosphere, the part of Earth’s upper atmosphere ionized by solar radiation. The results surprised them.
“Any space physicist, including me, would have said a year ago there could not be substorms when the interplanetary magnetic field was staying northward, but that’s wrong,” Lyons said. “Generally, it’s correct, but when you have a fluctuating interplanetary magnetic field, you can have substorms going off once per hour.
“Heejeong used detailed statistical analysis to prove this phenomenon is real. Convection in the magnetosphere and ionosphere can be strongly driven by these fluctuations, independent of the direction of the interplanetary magnetic field.”
Convection describes the transfer of heat, or thermal energy, from one location to another through the movement of fluids such as liquids, gases or slow-flowing solids.
“The energy of the particles and the fields in the magnetosphere can vary by large amounts. It can be 10 times higher or 10 times lower from day to day, even from half-hour to half-hour. These are huge variations in particle intensities, magnetic field strength and electric field strength,” Lyons said.
The magnetosphere was discovered in 1957. By the late 1960s, it had become accepted among scientists that the energy transfer rate was controlled predominantly by the interplanetary magnetic field.
Lyons and Kim were planning to study something unrelated when they made the discovery.
“We were looking to do something else, when we saw life is not the way we expected it to be,” Lyons said. “The most exciting discoveries in science sometimes just drop in your lap. In our field, this finding is pretty earth-shaking. It’s an entire new mode of energy transfer, which is step one. The next step is to understand how it works. It must be a completely different process.”
The National Science Foundation has funded ground-based radars which send off radio waves that reflect off the ionosphere, allowing scientists to measure the speed at which the ions in the ionosphere are moving.
The radar stations are based in Greenland and Alaska. The NSF recently built the Poker Flat Research Range north of Fairbanks.
“The National Science Foundation’s radars have enabled us to make this discovery,” Lyons said. “We could not have done this without them.”
The direction of the interplanetary magnetic field is important, Lyons said. Is it going in the same direction as the magnetic field going through the Earth? Does the interplanetary magnetic field connect with the Earth’s magnetic field?
“We thought there could not be strong convection and that the energy necessary for a substorm could not develop unless the interplanetary magnetic field is southward,” Lyons said. “I’ve said it and taught it. Now I have to say, ‘But when you have these fluctuations, which is not a rare occurrence, you can have substorms going off once an hour.'”
Lyons and Kim used the radar measurements to study the strength of the interaction between the solar wind and the Earth’s magnetosphere.
One of their papers addresses convection and its affect on substorms to show it is a global phenomenon.
“When the interplanetary magnetic field is pointing northward, there is not much happening, but when the interplanetary magnetic field is southward, the flow speeds in the polar regions of the ionosphere are strong. You see much stronger convection. That is what we expect,” Lyons said. “We looked carefully at the data, and said, ‘Wait a minute! There are times when the field is northward and there are strong flows in the dayside polar ionosphere.'”
The dayside has the most direct contact with the solar wind.
“It’s not supposed to happen that way,” Lyons said. “We want to understand why that is.”
“Heejeong separated the data into when the solar wind was fluctuating a lot and when it was fluctuating a little,” he added. “When the interplanetary magnetic field fluctuations are low, she saw the pattern everyone knows, but when she analyzed the pattern when the interplanetary magnetic field was fluctuating strongly, that pattern completely disappeared. Instead, the strength of the flows depended on the strength of the fluctuations.
“So rather than the picture of the connection between the magnetic field of the sun and the Earth controlling the transfer of energy by the solar wind to the Earth’s magnetosphere, something else is happening that is equally interesting. The next question is discovering what that is. We have some ideas of what that may be, which we will test.”
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savethesharks (00:16:00) :
I am not asking about the solar wind data.
I am asking about this:
The source of this animation from a simulator programme using wind and field data is the last 1 second of this:
http://www3.nict.go.jp/y/y223/simulation/realtime/movie/2009/test_6.20090121.avi
NOTE it is a simulation.
About Real-Time Magnetosphere Simulation
The real-time magnetosphere simulation is carried out using the MHD code developed by Prof. Tanaka. Input parameters are taken from the real-time solar wind and interplanetary magnetic field data observed routinely by the ACE satellite. Simulation results are visualized in real time. Note all of the plots here are based on the preliminary data (ACE Real Time Data), which have not been processed yet. (Press right panel to get the explanation of real-time magnetosphere simulation results (LatestImage))
It’s all down to planet X:
http://www.zetatalk.com/newsletr/issue134.htm
or it could be:
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Gamma_ray_Flare_Star_999.html
http://grblog.org/grblog.php?cite=GCN8833
PS:
Thanks for this, Bill. The hard question that needs to be asked here: What caused the SSW of this time period?
And why did the geopotential height anomaly chart continue to reflect positive deviations above normal for many weeks afterword?
We don’t know what cause SSW events. I would hope this one is being studied.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
kim (21:00:13) :
Now, c’mon, Leif, sure a theoretical point in space has no mass, but the barycenter represents the center of mass of the solar system.
Consider the system consisting of two people walking down a street on opposite sides of the street. Their barycenter in in the middle of the street. If I bump into any of the two, there is some physical effect, but not if I bump into their barycenter.
All the bodies in the solar system are in gravitational free fall and therefore do not feel any forces. The tidal forces come about because the gravitational field is not constant across a body. Whether the tides have any effect on a body depends on the size of the tide compared to the displacements of parts of the body that take place for reasons other than tides. The typical displacements on the Sun are random movements of 0.5 km per second compared to the largest tide of 0.5 mm per 13 days or 0.5 mm / (13*86400) second = 0.5 mm / 1,000,000 second or 0.000,000,5 mm/sec compared to the 500,000 mm/sec of the typical movements, a factor of a trillion. It is all a question of size. There are planets around other stars that are so close to their star that there tidal effects create huge star-spots [which we have actually observed], so it is not about if the tides have effect [they do], but about how small that effect is, compared to ordinarily goes on.
Leif Svalgaard (17:04:17) :
“Indeed it was, but it takes 4 days for the solar wind from that activity to reach the Earth.”
What about x-ray bursts, how do they affect the magnetosphere?
Leif, 1:19:43
Uh huh, and are these tidal forces similar in relative magnitude as the flares are to the mass of the sun?
======================================
Ulric Lyons (04:19:56) :
What about x-ray bursts, how do they affect the magnetosphere?
Gamma rays, X-rays, UV, sunlight, radio waves, etc do not affect the magnetosphere or bow shock directly. They do affect the ionosphere, which in turn does couple a little to the magnetosphere, but those effects are tiny and second order and would not be visible on the scale of the simulation in the video.
Gary Plyler (13:36:55) :
“Being excited about an amount of energy 3 or more orders of magnitude smaller than the total energy transfer is just silly.”
As is wanting to destroy the world’s economy over a few PPM 🙂
kim (07:23:02) :
Uh huh, and are these tidal forces similar in relative magnitude as the flares are to the mass of the sun?
different units are hard to compare. force, flares [energy], mass…
But it doesn’t matter how big the Sun is. A flare is a local phenomenon and the energy expended comes from kinetic energy of moving solar plasma that has been ‘wound up’ and stored as magnetic energy in a twisted magnetic field. So one can compare the kinetic energies; which is what I did [kinetic energy goes with the square of the speed – care to square a trillion…] in my last post.
Leif 9:33:45
Thanks; you persist as the voice of reason. I can’t help but compare this business to a Van de Graaf generator, where very little impetus can grossly change the location of the manifestation of electrical energy.
=======================================
Leif Svalgaard (01:19:43) :
All the bodies in the solar system are in gravitational free fall and therefore do not feel any forces.
This is the theoretical situation in a simplified and idealised solar system. Observations and discovered correlations indicate otherwise. The mechanism has not yet been elucidated, so Leif is entitled to his point of view. I merely wish to alert WUWt readers to the fact that there are those who disagree with it and are actively researching this area.
Rather than seeking the explanatory mechanism in traditional Newtonian mechanics, I think a promising area of research is to study the harmonics of the motions of orbiting bodies. One of the moons of Jupiter is sufficiently heated by the effects of it’s harmonic orbital relationships with the other major moons of the Jovian system for it to have active volcanos on it’s surface.
Scientists were “surprised” to discover this.
kim (10:07:22) :
I can’t help but compare this business to a Van de Graaf generator, where very little impetus can grossly change the location of the manifestation of electrical energy.
It takes energy to run the generator. I’ll bet you put more energy in that what you get out as ‘electrical energy’. Same thing with flares, it takes a lot of energy to create the conditions that flare.
tallbloke (10:21:42) :
“All the bodies in the solar system are in gravitational free fall and therefore do not feel any forces.”
This is the theoretical situation in a simplified and idealised solar system.
Newton’s and Einstein’s laws of gravity are valid for any system, simple or not.
Observations
show with great precision that the known laws are valid
discovered correlations indicate otherwise.
Correlations are what they are. Some are good [as geomagnetic activity depending on the Sun] which means that one have to accept them it even if no mechanism was known, and some are bad [like the ones you claim] which means that they cannot be taken as credible evidence for anything [expect gullibility].
I merely wish to alert WUWt readers to the fact that there are those who disagree with it
I’m sure that most are aware of this. Disagreements are all over the place [AGW anyone?] and do not in themselves lend credence to anything.
Rather than seeking the explanatory mechanism in traditional Newtonian mechanics, I think a promising area of research is to study the harmonics of the motions of orbiting bodies. One of the moons of Jupiter is sufficiently heated by the effects of it’s harmonic orbital relationships with the other major moons of the Jovian system for it to have active volcanos on it’s surface.
The heating of Io falls wholly within Newtonian mechanics, and BTW, Io is not heated by the harmonics, but by straightforward tidal kneading by Jupiter. The other moons just serve to place io is harms way. Tidal action is all over the Universe where distances are small enough and masses large enough. There are even massive planets in close orbits about their star that produce huge star-spots [which we have observed]. In the solar system the distances are too large for tidal forces by the planets on the sun. [see my comments to kim].
Leif Svalgaard (14:06:29) :
Correlations are what they are. Some are good [as geomagnetic activity depending on the Sun] which means that one have to accept them it even if no mechanism was known, and some are bad [like the ones you claim] which means that they cannot be taken as credible evidence for anything [expect gullibility].
You’ll come out to your car and find all your tires flat one day.
If I’m in the vicinity, it’ll be purely coincidental 😉
tallbloke (15:25:27) :
You’ll come out to your car and find all your tires flat one day.
If I’m in the vicinity, it’ll be purely coincidental 😉
I’ll consult the planetary positions [and the horoscope column – just to be sure] before venturing out. Can’t be too sure these days, better wear both belt and suspenders [perhaps even a tin-hat], methinks.
Leif Svalgaard (14:06:29) :
The heating of Io falls wholly within Newtonian mechanics, and BTW, Io is not heated by the harmonics, but by straightforward tidal kneading by Jupiter. The other moons just serve to place io is harms way.
Your oversimplistic analysis is incorrect.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/06/jupiters-tidal-squeeze-drives-extreme-volcanism-on-io.ars
It is the harmonics which currently modulate the eccentricity of Io’s orbit in a Laplace resonance, and this maximises the degree of the tidal heating caused by Jupiter. But this will change over time and so the temperature of Io will wax and wane over a long period.
I hear what you are saying about distances and masses. Do you hear what I’m saying about harmonics of many bodied situations making a difference to the energy interactions over long timescales?
tallbloke (16:55:18) :
“The other moons just serve to place io in harms way.”
Your oversimplistic analysis is incorrect.
Nonsense. The heating is done by tidal forces. As I said, the other moons and their ‘harmonics’ just serve to bring Io into such places where the heating is large.
Do you hear what I’m saying about harmonics of many bodied situations making a difference to the energy interactions over long timescales?
This is relevant in the Jovian system, but not to planets influencing the Sun. If we try to make an analogy, then it would be how the Sun’s tides on Jupiter might be helped by the 2:5 resonance with Saturn, not the other way around. And for this case the distances are too large for the tides to be effective anyway.
Leif Svalgaard (20:19:46) :
This is relevant in the Jovian system, but not to planets influencing the Sun. If we try to make an analogy, then it would be how the Sun’s tides on Jupiter might be helped by the 2:5 resonance with Saturn, not the other way around. And for this case the distances are too large for the tides to be effective anyway.
I don’t have any problem agreeing to disagree over this. I agree the tidal effects are small, but they are non zero, and I have seen how forces which weren’t considered large enough by science to have significant effects can be amplified by resonances.
This is why I’m not as ready to dismiss the possibilities as you are.
There will have been periods in the past when resonances in the inner solar system including those with our moon would have had bigger effects than we currently see. Ian Wilson has been doing some great work in this area, and his paper will elucidate some of those. It has been accepted for publication already.
The suns outer layers are a highly mobile plasma of very hot matter and energy. It seems entirely reasonable to me that the motion of this plasma will be affected by the motion of the surrounding planets. You pointed out that big planets close to other stars produce big spots on the stars. So why not smaller planets further out producing little spots on the sun? It all a matter of degree, and tidal action may not be the only effect. We have rehearsed those arguments and don’t need to go into them here and now.
The various barycentres between the planets and sun will have Lagrangian points associated with them, sometimes well inside the sun, sometimes near or even outside the surface. A priori, at these zero G points, relatively small energies can have relatively large effects. Please do comment on that idea.
In summary, you say the planets are too far out and too small to have an effect. I say we don’t know enough about the solar system with it’s never ending succession of scientific ‘surprises’ to be certain. I like it that way, becuase I like the possibility that there is more to be discovered. You seem to like certainty, and claim the sufficiency of known physics, but the Leighton Babcock dynamo theory is being spun onto it’s head at the moment, and the field is open as far as I can see.
Warmest regards to you as always.
tallbloke (01:19:21) :
The suns outer layers are a highly mobile plasma of very hot matter and energy. It seems entirely reasonable to me that the motion of this plasma will be affected by the motion of the surrounding planets
It most certainly is, it is just that the additional motions are so very tiny [trillionths] compared to the roiling messiness that goes on all the times.
>i>The various barycentres between the planets and sun will have Lagrangian points associated with them
No, there are no such points. The Lagrangian points are between the masses and not the barycenters, and are all very far from the Sun
In summary, you say the planets are too far out and too small to have an effect. I say we don’t know enough about the solar system with it’s never ending succession of scientific ’surprises’ to be certain.
We do know about tides and gravitational interactions. We use that knowledge to calculate highly accurate tide tables and interplanetary spacecraft orbits that take our craft to where we want them to go.
I like it that way, becuase I like the possibility that there is more to be discovered.
There are so much to be discovered, but most often, each discovery adds to our knowledge and builds on what we already know.
You seem to like certainty, and claim the sufficiency of known physics
You have that wrong in one sense and correct in another. The known physics is the result of untold many experiments and observations. The certainty comes from the agreement with those, and the uncertainty comes from the fact that the more we know, the deeper we can probe and when we do, we make new discoveries.
but the Leighton Babcock dynamo theory is being spun onto it’s head at the moment
This is a statement of ignorance fueling by wishful thinking. What is going on today is that we are being able to probe the details of the theory as never before. An apt analogy is trying to deduce the position of a planet. The observations show that the planet is not exactly where it should be. By further observations we discover another planet that tugs on the first, causing the discrepancy. There was nothing wrong with the theory, but there were unknown details [the extra planet]. Discovering and resolving the extra details in the end, end up strenghtening the theory.
As far as B-L theory is concerned, we are learning that the role of the meridional circulation [while important] is probably less than assumed in the models, or that the internal half of the circulation [which was assumed to be a mirror of the external one] may have unknown structure to it. All of these ‘problems’ are good as they teach us something we would not otherwise be able to interpret without the conceptual framework of B-L [or any other model we might entertain]. You see, without a detailed model we can’t learn anything. Physics has always progressed by fitting observations into a Standard Model, and physicists are loath to accept a new Standard Model, until the new model [in addition to explaining everything the old one did] has shown its value by explaining a large body of observations that the old one did not. There is no such detailed alternative model to the B-L theory, so the question of replacing B-L doesn’t even come up.
Leif Svalgaard (07:18:30) :
One more time [perhaps a nice moderator would delete the previous post…]
tallbloke (01:19:21) :
The suns outer layers are a highly mobile plasma of very hot matter and energy. It seems entirely reasonable to me that the motion of this plasma will be affected by the motion of the surrounding planets
It most certainly is, it is just that the additional motions are so very tiny [trillionths] compared to the roiling messiness that goes on all the times.
The various barycentres between the planets and sun will have Lagrangian points associated with them
No, there are no such points. The Lagrangian points are between the masses and not the barycenters, and are all very far from the Sun
In summary, you say the planets are too far out and too small to have an effect. I say we don’t know enough about the solar system with it’s never ending succession of scientific ’surprises’ to be certain.
We do know about tides and gravitational interactions. We use that knowledge to calculate highly accurate tide tables and interplanetary spacecraft orbits that take our craft to where we want them to go.
I like it that way, becuase I like the possibility that there is more to be discovered.
There is so much to be discovered, but most often, each discovery adds to our knowledge and builds on what we already know.
You seem to like certainty, and claim the sufficiency of known physics
You have that wrong in one sense and correct in another. The known physics is the result of untold many experiments and observations. The certainty comes from the agreement with those, and the uncertainty comes from the fact that the more we know, the deeper we can probe and when we do, we make new discoveries.
but the Leighton Babcock dynamo theory is being spun onto it’s head at the moment
That is a statement of ignorance fueling by wishful thinking. What is going on today is that we are being able to probe the details of the theory as never before. An apt analogy is trying to deduce the position of a planet. The observations show that the planet is not exactly where it should be. By further observations we discover another planet that tugs on the first, causing the discrepancy. There was nothing wrong with the theory, but there were unknown details [the extra planet]. Discovering and resolving the extra details, in the end end up strenghtening the theory.
As far as B-L theory is concerned, we are learning that the role of the meridional circulation [while important] is probably less than assumed in the models, or that the internal half of the circulation [which was assumed to be a mirror of the external one] may have unknown structure to it. All of these ‘problems’ are good as they teach us something we would not otherwise be able to interpret without the conceptual framework of B-L [or any other model we might entertain]. You see, without a detailed model we can’t learn anything. Physics has always progressed by fitting observations into a Standard Model, and physicists are loath to accept a new Standard Model, until the new model [in addition to explaining everything the old one did] has shown its value by explaining a large body of observations that the old one did not. There is no such detailed alternative model to the B-L theory, so the question of replacing B-L doesn’t even come up.
Leif 14:06:29
Yes, I understand about the energy, but think how small a force is required to redirect almost constantly all that energy to seemingly random spots on the inner surface of the sphere. Are these forces of redirection in the van de Graaf analogous to the tidal forces within the sun?
===============================
tallbloke 1:19:21
Yes, the correlation is there and the possibility; Leif, correctly, insists on proof.
===========================
kim (07:24:24) :
Are these forces of redirection in the van de Graaf analogous to the tidal forces within the sun?
The elctromagnetic forces are 10^40 times stronger than the gravitational tidal forces, and the process is completely different. The Van de Graaf generator relies on parts of it being an insulator to prevent the charges from going anywhere until they become so strong that they can ionize the air and discharge. There are no insulators on or in the Sun.
kim (07:26:30) :
Yes, the correlation is there and the possibility; Leif, correctly, insists on proof.
Before that, even, I insist that the correlation is too weak to warrant further investigation. There are zillions of weak, marginal, spurious, and coincidental correlations, and physicists usually won’t bother with any of those, so show a good one [not just declaim that there is one – show it, provide the data, etc, so one can analyse the correlation with all the modern tools one has, computers, etc]. I have issued that challenge several times: find the very best one in your opinion, and we’ll all look at it and analyse it together. Until then, ‘shut up’ 🙂
I think Leif actually is insisting (correctly) on observational evidence, not “proof”. This is science, not mathematics. Mathematics is the tool, not the progenitor, of physics ideas.
Okay, here is a very interesting weather/electricity synthesis from the Forum (blogs) at the Thunderbolts web site: http://charles-chandler.org/Geophysics/Tornadoes%20Full.php
Regarding how far one wavelength or another of electromagnetic (EM) penetrates the atmosphere, the ground, the ocean isn’t the point – the attenuation rate at which the energy is absorbed is moot since the absorption process itself changes the incident energy to heat. Note that incident energy may be partially reflected (albedo, in both the tiny window of optical wavelengths as well as the rest of the EM spectrum up and down. Raising the temperature (kinetic temperature, specifically; molecular motion) increases the infrared signature of the planet, i.e, re-radiates a part of the energy uptake back into space, as well as into all the surrounding local medium. If you look at our planetary temperature in degrees Kelvin over a fairly long period of time, (“deep time” – hundreds of millions of years) I posit that it is close to flat, which means that, overall, energy in = energy out. This implies, in the EU idea of things, that the sun has remained reasonably constant over this period, despite changes to sunspot counts, CME’s etc. Why? The large Birkeland current in which it/we reside has maintained a fairly steady value over time, despite the typical oscillations normal with lasma phenomena (A. Peratt, Los Alamos, Physics of the Plasma Universe, 1992). No one I have read so far ‘fesses up to knowing for how long this has been going on nor how long it is likely to continue, nor what mechanism drives these large currents across space, down the galactic arms, and between galaxies and the filamentary galaxy clusters and superclusters. Keep working on really understanding how it all works, though! illegitamus non carborundum.
jjohnson (09:52:57) :
Okay, here is a very interesting weather/electricity synthesis from the Forum (blogs) at the Thunderbolts web site
I do not subscribe to the idea of giant currents criss-crossing galactic space. Current have to be continuously ‘driven’ or ‘created’ as the very fact that they flow will discharge them. In the rest-frame of the plasma [that is moving with the plasma] there is no electric field and hence no currents. We have gone over this many times, and I don’t feel like doing it again.
Plain rejection of a theory or worse of experimental facts it is not science but a fanatical creed, and their defenders equal those Holy Inquisition dominican priests.