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What's happening in this prediction model animation?


finn

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I particularly enjoy the WSA-Enlil model and in times of events, keep an eye on it. I'm quite used to what kind of dynamics to expect in it, but today there's some behavior that I haven't seen before: the density cloud spewed out by the sun appears to get its trajectory severely distorted, either because of the Earth or because of the dense wing of solar wind spiral approaching to catch up with it. Is this really what happens, or have I caught the model at a point when it was being recalibrated somehow and the prediction is in an unfinished state?

I saved this gif as a file because the online model gets updated all the time and I wanted to freeze the way that the model looks at the time of typing this.

If the behavior depicted by this model is what is really happening, could someone please explain the physics there, what's going on (in terms of the trajectory change)? I usually don't see the Earth affecting the wave in any way, or if it does, it merely creates a point-like "shadow" but doesn't affect the behavior of the entire cloud like it was some kind of jelly-like entity.

iSWACygnetStreamer.gif

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12 minutes ago, Marcel de Bont said:

It seems that according to the model, the plasma cloud will interact with a dense coronal hole solar wind stream perhaps slowing it down and ''push'' the magnetic cloud along with the stream.

Hmm I see. So should I actually look at the interaction just before the cloudfront even reaches the Earth? The denser concentration of wind particles (green spiral) would already interact with it there and start to slow it down. What still looks strange to me is the other edge (in the up direction in this model) which doesn't appear to collide with anything much, yet it gets deflected what in this model is 'downwards'. I often wish that this animation could be slowed down or stopped for better inspection, like the density/velocity timeline version allows you to go frame by frame!

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