Fast solar wind has been recognized, about 40 years ago, to originate in polar coronal holes (CHs), that, since then, have been identified with sources of recurrent high speed wind streams. As of today, however, there is no general consensus about whether there are, within CHs, preferential locations where the solar wind is accelerated. Knowledge of slow wind sources is far from complete as wel...

The abundance of He in the present day local interstellar cloud (LIC) and in the sun has important implications for the study of galactic evolution and for estimating the production of light nuclei in the early universe. Data from the Solar Wind Ion Composition Spectrometer (SWICS) on Ulysses is used to measure the isotopic ratio of helium (He=He = Γ) both in the solar wind and the local inters...

A&G • February 2013 • Vol. 54 1.25 The continuous flow of matter that escapes out of the solar gravitational well is known as the solar wind. As the material flows out of the Sun, it is accelerated to between 400 and 800 km s. Through this continuous flow of material, the Sun loses more than one million tonnes every second. But this is just a tiny fraction, corresponding to 2 × 10 of a solar ma...

A&G • February 2013 • Vol. 54 1.25 The continuous flow of matter that escapes out of the solar gravitational well is known as the solar wind. As the material flows out of the Sun, it is accelerated to between 400 and 800 km s. Through this continuous flow of material, the Sun loses more than one million tonnes every second. But this is just a tiny fraction, corresponding to 2 × 10 of a solar ma...

The Western Wind and Solar Integration Study Phase 1 (WWSIS1) investigated the impacts of high penetrations of wind and solar power on the Western Interconnection of the United States. The Western Wind and Solar Integration Study Phase 2 (WWSIS2) built on Phase 1 but with far greater refinement in the level of data inputs and production simulation. It considered the differences between wind and...

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) was launched in December 1995 with a suite of instruments designed to answer long-standing questions about the Sun’s internal structure, its extensive outer atmosphere, and the solar wind. This paper reviews the new understanding of the physical processes responsible for the solar wind that have come from the past 8 years of SOHO observations, analy...

By introducing a hitherto ignored Li producing process, due to accelerated He reactions with He, we show that accelerated particle interactions in solar flares produce much more Li than Li. By normalizing our calculations to gamma-ray data we demonstrate that the Li produced in solar flares, combined with photospheric Li, can account for the recently determined solar wind lithium isotopic ratio...

[1] Variations in the speed and elemental and ionic charge composition of the solar wind are reported throughout the solar cycle, as observed by the SWICS instrument on Ulysses. The apparent bimodal nature of the solar wind during the solar minimum does not persist throughout the solar cycle. Rather, with increasing solar activity, a continuum of solar wind speeds and charge states is observed....

The most fundamental problem in solar system research is still unsolved: how can the Sun with a surface temperature of only 5800 K heat up its atmosphere to more than a million K? In fact, the solar atmosphere is so hot that not even the Sun’s enormous gravity can contain it. Part of it is continuously evaporating into interplanetary space: the SOLAR WIND. As a highly ionized magnetized plasma ...

This paper reports stochastic properties of renewable wind and solar energy resources by studying their conditional probability distribution functions (cpdf) in different time lags. The empirical results are obtained for data of global horizontal irradiance measured by a single sensor and the power output of a single wind turbine, as well as for an averaged solar sensor field and an aggregated ...