| Session Details | |
| Section | ST - Solar & Terrestrial Sciences |
| Session Title | Waves and Turbulence in the Solar Atmosphere and Solar Wind |
| Main Convener | Dr. Bo Li (Shandong University, China) |
| Co-convener(s) | Dr. Christopher Chen (Imperial College London, United Kingdom) Dr. Jiansen He (Peking University, China) Prof. Leon Ofman (Catholic University of America, United States) Dr. De-Jin Wu (Chinese Academy of Sciences, China) |
| Session Description | Waves and turbulence are key to a number of key issues in the physics of the solar atmosphere and solar wind. Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) waves have been found in most, if not all, structures in the Sun’s atmosphere. Aided with MHD wave theory, these measurements are indispensible for inferring the atmospheric parameters difficult to measure directly. Meanwhile, sophisticated theoretical and numerical studies have shed new light on the generation, propagation, and dissipation of various wave modes. Wave-based scenarios have been brought back to the forefront of the key issue of coronal heating. Furthermore, the past two decades have seen remarkable progress in understanding turbulence in the solar wind, thanks to in situ instruments on board such spacecraft as Helios, WIND, Ulysses, ACE, and CLUSTER. In particular, weak turbulence is related to waves. With the emergence of new theories and advanced simulations, these measurements helped better understand how wave-vector anisotropy develops, the nature of turbulence at kinetic scales, how intermittency influences turbulence spectra, and how turbulence shapes particle velocity distributions. The interpretation of these in situ measurements also gives clues to how turbulence evolves in the near-Sun regions. Consequently, significant progress was achieved on the physics of turbulence and its role in heating and accelerating the solar wind from coronal sources out to interplanetary space. This session solicits contributions on waves and turbulence in the solar atmosphere and solar wind from both observational analyses and theoretical or numerical modeling. This session will help build a unified picture on how waves and turbulence evolve from their sources out to the Earth and beyond. It will also help prepare the community for the upcoming data from Solar Orbiter and Solar Probe Plus. Both missions will be launched in 2018, and both are anticipated to provide measurements impacting the above topics. |