EAGER: Long-Term Solar Wind Trends and the Implications for Current and Future Solar Activity

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The Principal Investigator will perform an extended evaluation of long-term solar wind trends. This will include using proxy data (specifically, quiet-time dayside magnetometer observations) to (1) determine whether solar wind dynamic pressure has been increasing throughout the 20th century along with the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF); (2) explore the newly discovered relationship between the solar wind helium abundance and the IMF; and (3) investigate the changes in that relationship as the helium abundance has plummeted to values far below the normal level for the last 50 years. This research might point the way to a comprehensive phenomenological framework that provides an understanding of solar wind changes in terms of the evolution of the solar cycle, and perhaps even provide evidence that the more than century-long Grand Solar Maximum is at an end. This line of research may also provide important clues for solar physics more broadly, as it attempts to improve our understanding of the Sun.The project will support the training of an undergraduate student who will be deeply involved in the research. In addition, a better understanding of solar activity, as well as the use of solar wind trends to predict solar activity, will allow our civilization to improve space weather forecasting and thereby mitigate the negative effects on the on-orbit and ground-based technology upon which we depend and which is vulnerable to space weather effects.