Great geomagnetic storms in the rise and maximum of solar cycle 23

Geomagnetic storms are intervals of time when a sufficiently intense and long-lasting interplanetary convection electric field leads, through a substantial injection of energy into the magnetosphere-ionosphere system, to an intensified ring current, strong enough to exceed some key threshold of the quantifying storm time Dst index. We have studied all the 9 great magnetic storms (peak Dst < -200 nT) observed during the rise and maximum of solar cycle 23 (from 1997 to early 2001), in order to identify their solar and interplanetary causes. Apart of one storm occurred during the period without observations from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), all of them were related to coronal mass ejections observed by the Large Angle and Spectroscopic Coronagraph (LASCO). The sources of interplanetary southward magnetic field, Bs, responsible for the occurrence of the storms were related to the intensified shock/sheath field, interplanetary magnetic cloud's field, or the combination of sheath-cloud or sheath-ejecta field. It called our attention the fact that one of the events was related to a slow CME, with CME expansion speed not greater than 550 km/s. The purpose of this paper is to address the main sources of large geomagnetic disturbances using the current satellite capability available. As a general conclusion, we found that shock/sheath compressed fields are the most important interplanetary causes of great magnetic storms during this period.

Bibliographic Details

Main Authors:	Dal Lago,A., Vieira,L. E. A., Echer,E., Gonzalez,W. D., Clúa de Gonzalez,A. L., Guarnieri,F. L., Balmaceda,L., Santos,J., Silva,M. R. da, Lucas,A. de, Schuch,N. J.
Format:	Digital revista
Language:	English
Published:	Sociedade Brasileira de Física 2004
Online Access:	http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0103-97332004000800008
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