Coronal Mass Ejections and Interplanetary Magnetic Clouds

Helfried Biernat1, Christian Moestl1, Martin Leitner2, Ulrich Taubenschuss3, Nikolai Erkaev4, Charles Farrugia5
  1. Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Graz, Austria
  2. Institute for Astro- and Particle Physics, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
  3. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA
  4. Institute of Computational Modelling, Russian Academy of Sciences, Krasnoyarsk, Russia
  5. Space Science Center and Dept. of Physics, University of New Hampshire, Durham, USA

Coronal mass ejections, the hurricanes of space, are massive expulsions of plasma and magnetic fields from
the outer solar atmosphere into the interplanetary medium. Much effort in theoretical modelling and data
interpretation is devoted to the understanding of their origin on the Sun, their interplanetary propagation,
and their properties when they arrive at Earth as magnetic clouds. In this report, we review on some recent
developments in these areas of solar-terrestrial relations.