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Space Climate Symposium, September 19-22, 2022

Krakow, Poland
Fully on-site meeting

Space Climate 8 Meeting Abstract

Measuring Deflection of Coronal Mass Ejections

Pertti Mäkelä (The Catholic University of America and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

Nat Gopalswamy, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Sachiko Akiyama, The Catholic University of America and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Hong Xie, The Catholic University of America and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Seiji Yashiro, The Catholic University of America and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center


Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) can be deflected near the Sun by high magnetic fields of a coronal hole (CH) close to the eruption site or when the eruption occurs at the periphery of an active region (AR) by the magnetic field structures of the AR. Deflection depends on the phase of the solar cycle because during the minimum and rise phase CMEs are deflected by the polar CHs and during the declining phase by the low-latitude CHs. The deflected CME will propagate along a non-radial direction away from the source region. The non-radial propagation direction will affect the geoeffectiveness of Earth-directed CMEs. We have modified the Graduated Cylindrical Shell (GCS) model to take into account a non-radial propagation by adding two angle parameters that describe the tilt of the main axis of the model away from the radial direction fixed by the source location at the solar surface. For the highly deflected 2010 August 14 CME, we estimated that the CME propagation was deflected ~42 degrees from the radial direction towards south-east from the source region at N13W54. Although the modification is quite simple, it provides a more realistic CME trajectory through the corona. The measurements could also be compared with numerical CME propagation models such as the ForeCAT (Forecasting a CME's Altered Trajectory) model.

Mode of presentation: poster (Need to be confirmed by the SOC)


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