Recent advances in radiation belt dynamics and wave-particle interactions in the Earth’s inner magnetosphere

<正>Radiation belt dynamics and the related wave-particle interactions in the Earth’s inner magnetosphere are a very important research field in space physics.Since the launch of Van Allen Probes on August 30,2012,many substantial advances have been achieved,and some of them are briefly reviewed in this paper.Using Van Allen Probes data soon after its launch,Baker et al.(2013)discovered a relativistic electron storage ring that was embedded in Earth’s outer Van Allen belt.The     

The ONAD method for solving the SH-wave equation and simulation of the SH-wave propagation in the Earth’s mantle

The optimal nearly-analytic discrete(ONAD) method is a new numerical method developed in recent years for solving the wave equation.Compared with other methods,such as popularly-used finite-difference methods,the ONAD method can effectively suppress the numerical dispersion when coarse grids are used.In this paper,the ONAD method is extended to solve the 2-dimensional SH-wave equation in the spherical coordinates.To investigate the accuracy and the efficiency of the ONAD method,we compare the numerical results calculated by the ONAD method and other methods for both the homogeneous model and the inhomogeneous IASP91 model.The comparisons indicate that the ONAD method for solving the SH-wave equation in the spherical coordinates has the advantages of less numerical dispersion,small memory requirement for computer codes,and fast calculation.As an application,we use the ONAD method to simulate the SH-wave propagating between the Earth’s surface and the core-mantle boundary(CMB).Meanwhile,we investigate the SH-wave propagating in the mantle through analyzing the wave-field snapshots in different times and synthetic seismograms.     

Prediction of relativistic electron flux in the Earth’s outer radiation belt at geostationary orbit by adaptive methods

The paper investigates the possibilities of the prediction of the time series of the flux of relativistic electrons in the Earth’s outer radiation belt by parameters of the solar wind and the interplanetary magnetic field measured at the libration point and by the values of the geomagnetic indices. Different adaptive methods are used (namely, artificial neural networks, group method of data handling, and projection to latent structures). The comparison of quality indicators of predictions with a horizon of 1–12 h between each other and with the trivial model prediction has shown that the best result is obtained for the average value of the responses of three neural networks that have been trained with different sets of initial weights. The prediction result of the group method of data handling is close to the result of neural networks, and the projection to latent structures is much worse. It is shown that an increase in the prediction horizon from 1 to 12 h reduces its quality but not dramatically, which makes it possible to use these methods for medium-term prediction.     

Influence of heliospheric and geomagnetic activity on the dynamics of the relativistic electron fluxes in the Earth’s outer radiation belt around the minimum of the solar activity in 2008–2010

The relativistic electron flux in the Earth’s outer radiation belt generally decreased by almost three orders of magnitude during the minimum of cycle 23 in 2009. Such a behavior was possibly caused by very low geomagnetic activity during an extremely weak interplanetary field in that period. This decrease was replaced by an increase in the relativistic electron flux by two orders of magnitude during several months after the sunspot minimum at the beginning of 2010.     

Temporal vP/vS variation characteristics in different zones of China’s Capital Circle area before and after Wen’an earthquake

On July 4, 2006, an earthquake of MS5.1 took place in Wen’an, Hebei Province, just at the south center of China’s Capital Circle area digital seismograph network. It is the strongest event recorded ever since the network went into operation in 2002. We processed the vast amounts of phase data yielded by the 107 digital seismic stations between 2002~2007 using Wadati method. In order to improve the precision and stability of shear and compressional wave velocities (vP/vS) calculation, we impose a number of r...     

Temporal vP/vS variation characteristics in different zones of China’s Capital Circle area before and after Wen’an earthquake

On July 4, 2006, an earthquake of MS5.1 took place in Wen’an, Hebei Province, just at the south center of China’s Capital Circle area digital seismograph network. It is the strongest event recorded ever since the network went into operation in 2002. We processed the vast amounts of phase data yielded by the 107 digital seismic stations between 2002~2007 using Wadati method. In order to improve the precision and stability of shear and compressional wave velocities (vP/vS) calculation, we impose a number of restrictions on the computation environment and condition, e.g., the earthquakes are densely concentrated, selected stations are limited in range, the number of stations in- volved in the computation is larger than 5 and linear fitting features high precision and small error. Under these restrictions, the study shows that vP/vS in and around Wen’an and Tangshan underwent a normal-low-normal proc- ess one year before Wen’an earthquake, vP/vS became obviously low and the low ratio lasted for about one year, meanwhile, little variation of vP/vS was seen in Xingtai, northwest of Beijing, southwest of Beijing, Beijing-Tianjin and Beijing; after the quake, the vP/vS returned normal in Wen’an and Tangshan. Error and stability analysis of the calculated result for vP/vS shows it is convincible that anomaly appeared in and around Wen’an and Tangshan be- fore Wen’an earthquake.     

Variations in solar radiation in the solar activity cycle: Response of Earth’s atmospheric parameters (numerical modeling and analysis of observational data)

The results of a three-dimensional numerical simulation of changes in the temperature and wind within a height range of up to 100 km caused by changes in fluxes in the solar ultraviolet (UV) radiation in the 23rd solar activity cycle (which was characterized by unusually low values of UV-radiation fluxes) and also of global changes in the ozone content are presented. The simulation results showed that the response of the temperature to variations in the UV radiation are substantially of a nonzonal character, which is caused by the presence in the model of sources of quasi-stationary waves corresponding to the observational data.