Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Complexity Heliophysics: A [New] System Science That Transcends The Previous Boundaries Of Our Field, Ryan M. Mcgranaghan, Seebany Datta-Barua, Jeffrey Thayer, Joe Borovsky, Jay R. Johnson, Simon Wing, Dan Baker, Massimo Materassi

Faculty Publications

Synopsis

1. The 21st century is the time of complexity. We delineate it and its importance as necessary to solve ‘wicked problems.’

2. Inherently transdisciplinary, trans-scale, and interconnected to living systems, the solution to Heliophysics’ identity crisis and to unlock the next generation of scientific discovery may be to embrace complexity.

3. With the right foresight, direction, and incentive over the next ten years, Heliophysics can become a beacon for how all of society thinks about and does complexity science.

Seasonal And Diurnal Variations Of Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability At Terrestrial Magnetopause, S. Kavosi, J. Raeder, Jay R. Johnson, K. Nykyri, C. J. Farrugia

Faculty Publications

Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability is ubiquitous at Earth’s magnetopause and plays an important role in plasma entry into the magnetosphere during northward interplanetary magnetic fields. Here, using one solar cycle of data from NASA THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macro scale Interactions during Substorms) and MMS (Magnetospheric Multiscale) missions, we found that KHI occurrence rates show seasonal and diurnal variations with the rate being high near the equinoxes and low near the solstices. The instability depends directly on the Earth’s dipole tilt angle. The tilt toward or away from the Sun explains most of the seasonal and diurnal variations, while the …

Information Horizon Of Solar Active Regions, Jay R. Johnson, Simon Wing, Carson O'Ffill, Bishwa Neupane

Faculty Publications

Information theory is used to characterize the solar active region periodicities and memories from the Carrington map images 1974–2021. The active regions typically evolve and move from one map to the next. In order to track these active region structures in sequences of images, an innovative method based on information theory is developed. Image entropy provides a measure of the organization of structures in the images. The entropy can also be used as a filter to identify structures and partition the active regions, which are then registered for each image. The partitions are used to compute the mutual information and …

How Noise Thresholds Affect The Information Content Of Stellar Flare Sequences, Elmer C. Rivera, Jay R. Johnson, Jonathan Homan, Simon Wing

Faculty Publications

Systems that exhibit discrete dynamics can be well described and reconstructed by considering the set of time intervals between the discrete events of the system. The Kepler satellite has cataloged light curves for many Sun-like stars, and these light curves show strong bursts in intensity that are associated with stellar flares. The waiting time between these flares describes the fundamental dynamics of the stars and is driven by physical processes, such as flux emergence. While it is rather straightforward to identify large flares, the identification of weaker flares can be challenging because of the presence of noise. A common practice …