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Intermittencies and Local Heating in Magnetic Cloud Boundary Layers

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Abstract

We perform a statistical study on the intermittency and the associated local heating in the front boundary layers (BLs) of 74 magnetic clouds (MCs). The intermittent structures are identified by the partial variance of increments (PVI) method. The probability distribution function of PVI-values reveals that the BLs are more intermittent than adjacent sheath regions, and they contain a greater concentration of strong intermittencies. These strong intermittencies are accompanied by local enhancement of the proton temperature, while the enhancement is not prominent at weaker intermittencies inside the BLs. Since the strong intermittencies are associated with magnetic reconnection (MR) processes according to previous studies, these results indicate that MR processes may account for the local heating in the MCBLs to a large extent.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the Wind/MFI, SWE, and 3DP teams and CDAWeb for making available data used in this article. This article uses data from the Heliospheric Shock Database, generated and maintained at the University of Helsinki. This work is jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41731067,41531073), Shenzhen Technology Project JCYJ20170307150645407, Shenzhen Technology Project JCYJ20180306171748011, and the Specialized Research Fund for State Key Laboratories of China.

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  1. Laboratory for Space Weather Storms, Institute of Space Science and Applied Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, Shenzhen, 518000, China

    Zilu Zhou, Pingbing Zuo, Xueshang Feng, Yi Wang & Chaowei Jiang

  2. SIGMA Weather Group, State Key Laboratory for Space Weather, National Space Science Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Zilu Zhou, Xueshang Feng & Xiaojian Song

  3. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Zilu Zhou & Xiaojian Song

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  1. Zilu Zhou
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Zhou, Z., Zuo, P., Feng, X. et al. Intermittencies and Local Heating in Magnetic Cloud Boundary Layers. Sol Phys 294, 149 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-019-1537-0

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