Dynamics of solar wind speed: Cycle 23

A statistical signal processing approach has been made to study the dynamics of the speed of steady flow of hot plasma from the corona of sun known as solar wind generated in Solar Cycle 23. A long time series of solar wind speed of length 2492 days from 1st Jan, 1997 to 28th October, 2003 collected from Coordinated Heliospheric Observations (COHO) data base at NASA's National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) is investigated for this purpose. Detection of nonlinearity and chaos in dynamics of solar wind speed is the prime objective of this work. In the present analysis delay vector variance (DVV) method is used to detect the existence of nonlinearity within the dynamics of solar wind speed. To explore the signature of the chaos in it multiple statistical methodologies like '0-1' test, the correlation dimension analysis, computation of Information Entropy of the time series and Largest Lyapunov Exponent method have been applied. It has been observed that though the coronal plasma i.e. solar wind flow rate has a nonlinear dynamics but without any chaos. The absence of chaos indicates a probable regular behaviour of the series. The unit magnitude of the Correlation dimension indicates the presence of the deterministic component of the series. Embedding Dimension obtained argues that the deterministic component has dimension of six. The nearly zero value of the Lyapunov exponent claims that the system is conservative and exhibits Lyapunov stability. These revelations establish that not only the solar wind speed alone but the solar wind-magnetosphere coupling is also contributing towards the complexity of the magnetospheric plasma dynamics.