Tracking Back the Solar Wind to Its Photospheric Footpoints from Wind Observations – A Statistical Study

Abstract

It is of great importance to track the solar wind back to its photospheric source region and identify the related current sheets; this will provide key information for investigating the origin and predictions of the solar wind. We report a statistical study relating the photospheric footpoint motion and in-situ observation of current sheets in the solar wind. We used the potential force-free source–surface (PFSS) model and the daily synoptic charts to trace the solar wind back from 1 AU, as observed by the Wind spacecraft, to the solar surface. As the footpoints move along the solar surface we obtain a time series of the jump times between different points. These jumps can be within a cell and between adjacent cells. We obtained the distribution of the jump times and the distribution for a subset of the jump times in which only jumps between adjacent cells were counted. For both cases, the distributions clearly show two populations. These distributions are compared with the distribution of in-situ current sheets reported in an earlier work of Miao, Peng, and Li (Ann. Geophys. 29, 237, 2011). Its implications on the origin of the current sheets are discussed.