Long-Term Solar Variability (LSV) Section
The long-term variability of solar magnetism describes changes at the Sun that take place over the course of weeks, months, years, decades, and even centuries or longer. Such changes have profound consequences for the Earth's space environment, and, to a lesser extent, for its climate system. The origins and impacts of these changes have deep relevance to related variability in stars and stellar systems.
The mission of the LSV section is to promote understanding of long-term solar variability from the Sun's interior out to the heliosphere. We work with the community to achieve this using a combination of observations, theory, and numerical models to probe outstanding questions of magnetic dynamos, of convection and flows, of magnetic flux emergence and sunspots, of the evolution of the Sun's corona and the heliosphere, and of solar cycle variation.
Space Climate Initiative: A coordinated research effort to determine how extremes of solar variability affect space climate and climate, through modeling the system from the Sun's interior to the Earth's atmosphere.
The Solar Dynamo
The ultimate origins of solar variability lie below the visible surface, where turbulent convection, differential rotation, and meridional flows work together to produce magnetic fields through the operation of a stellar dynamo, giving rise to the 22-year solar magnetic cycle. Read more »
Solar Convecton and Mean Flows
The plasma flows in the solar interior that power the solar dynamo arise by means of turbulent thermal convection which transports heat from the deep interior to the solar surface and redistributes energy and momentum, establishing differential rotation and meridional flows. Read more »
Magnetic Flux Emergence
Understanding the process of magnetic flux emergence through the solar convection zone is crucial for understanding the link between the observed magnetic activities at the surface and the dynamo-generated magnetic fields in the interior. Read more »
Recent advances in supercomputing have introduced a new level of realism in the theoretical modelling of sunspot structure. Read more »
Coronal and Heliospheric Evolution
The magnetic field in the Sun's atmosphere continuously evolves through processes of emergence, diffusion, and reconnection, resulting in ongoing reorganizations of the global coronal/helio- spheric magnetic morphology, as well as in the slow buildup of magnetic energy in twisted or sheared magnetic fields. Read more »
Solar Cycle Studies
We pursue an interdisciplinary, system-wide view on the origins and impacts of solar and stellar cycle variation, with a particular focus on magnetic minima as times of low activity and relatively simple heliospheric structure.Read more »