Physics Commons^™

Displacement Of The Earth's Bow Shock And Magnetopause Due To An Impinging Interplanetary Shock Wave, William A. Olson

Theses and Dissertations

Interplanetary shock waves (ISWs) propagating through the solar wind can collide with the earth's bow shock, resulting in a series of new shocks, contact discontinuities, and rarefaction waves which interact to effectively move the bow shock and magnetopause toward the earth. A one dimensional MacCormack predictor corrector algorithm with Flux Corrected Transport (FCT) was developed to model the ISW bow shock and magnetopause interactions, and to numerically predict their propagation speeds after collision. Analytic relationships for the Mach numbers and propagation speeds of the generated shock waves and contact discontinuities were used to validate the model and to compare numerical …