IHY New Insights into Helio-Terrestrial physics Zvenigorod 2007

Pevtsov's Law: there is a clear relationship between the magnetic flux and the associated power dissipation throughout heliophysics

As part of the International Heliophysical Year and the 50th Anniversary of Sputnik,the Russian Astrophysics organizations will host a symposium on the connections and coupling of the earth-sun relationship.

The Symposium is intended for cooperation of scientists from different fields of space research: solar, heliospheric, magnetospheric, atmospheric etc. and discussion of the Sun - Earth system as an integrated complex. The International Heliophysical Year should result in development of global models of solar phenomena influence on the near-Earth environment. Such models are necessary to protect technological systems, ecology and human life itself. For this purpose, all of the available experimental data obtained by different in-situ, remote and imaging methods should be summarized, and all modeling efforts should be combined.

The goal of the symposium is to present and discuss the first advances in International Heliophysical Year execution and to coordinate the future activities in 2008.

We will examine some interesting questions in a number of posts that we have covered previously.

As we observed here in McCracken 2007

For example, the upper atmospheres of planets, including Earth, are dramatically affected by energetic inputs originating at the Sun in the form of photons, particles, and fields.

How ever, there are many pathways by which that solar energy is transformed and redistributed throughout the atmosphere until the energy is ultimately re-radiated to space. Connected with these processes is much of the inherent variability of the atmosphere over daily to millennial time scales. The lower atmosphere is periodically pumped and heated, giving rise to a spectrum of small scale gravity waves and longer-period oscillations. These waves can propagate into the mesosphere and thermosphere depositing momentum. The atmospheric mean circulation is thereby modified, resulting in changes to the temperature structure and redistribution of radiation absorbers and emitters. The mean wind and temperature structures in turn influence the propagation of the waves and the manner in which they couple the lower and upper atmosphere.