HR: 17:30h
AN: SH54A-07    [Abstracts]
TI: A Study of the Magnetic Storm of April 2002 Using the Virtual S3C Great Observatory
AU: * Roberts, D A
EM: aaron.roberts@nasa.gov
AF: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 612.2, Greenbelt, MD 20771 United States
AB: A major point of Virtual Observatories is to enhance our ability to study global scientific problems, thereby realizing the promise of the S3C Great Observatory. This talk will show how this is already possible through the existing tools of the Virtual Solar Observatory, the Virtual Space Physics Observatory, and ViSBARD, a freely available 3-D visualization tool that is directly connected to Internet data sources. The Virtual Observatories allow a rapid survey of the data using both easily available survey plots and direct access to plotting services such as offered using Web Services by CDAWeb. The tools give direct pointers to LASCO movies of the solar corona that reveal a very active Sun, with a halo CME and many other ejections on the 15th of April. Details of these can be observed in images retrieved from VSO. A few days later, Dst becomes strongly negative in response to an interplanetary shock driven by a magnetic cloud. The storm lasts for days, driven by strong southward interplanetary magnetic fields. The solar wind driver and the magnetospheric response are rapidly understood using the 3-D visualization. The highly disturbed magnetosphere is readily visible in the geosynchronous magnetic field that becomes, at times, very tail-like. A near-simultaneous crossing of the bow shock and magnetopause by Wind and Geotail reveals the complex structure of the magnetosheath. Multiple tail current sheet crossings show the tail structure. We will show movies that reveal how dozens of variables from many spacecraft relate to each other in time. The talk will conclude with a brief list of the many aspects of the VOs that need to be improved to make the above analysis easier.
DE: 2100 INTERPLANETARY PHYSICS
DE: 2700 MAGNETOSPHERIC PHYSICS (6939)
DE: 7800 SPACE PLASMA PHYSICS
DE: 7900 SPACE WEATHER
SC: SPA-Solar and Heliospheric Physics [SH]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005