Meet the Jury Emma Davies on ICME Variability in Solar Cycle 25: Insights from In Situ Multi-Spacecraft Upstream Measurements

Arenberg Doctoral School is proud to invite you to Meet The Jury!

When internationally renowned experts visit KU Leuven as a member of a PhD Examination Committee, we like to seize this opportunity to give this expert a forum to a large audience. All members of Science, Engineering & Technology are most welcome to the Meet The Jury Lectures.

Dr. Emma Davies (Austrian Space Weather Office, GeoSphere Austria, Graz, Austria) will give a lecture on “ICME Variability in Solar Cycle 25: Insights from In Situ Multi-Spacecraft Upstream Measurements”.

SHORT ABSTRACT:
The complex processes affecting the propagation of interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs) make understanding and predicting their physical properties and global structure challenging from both fundamental and practical space weather perspectives. Multi-spacecraft observations of ICMEs across varying longitudinal and radial separations provide valuable insights into their general properties, expansion, and interactions with the solar wind environment during propagation. However, by tracking the properties of individual events, we often find significant variability compared to average trends. As we enter the declining phase of Solar Cycle 25, we investigate the events of this cycle that follow previously determined relationships and those that deviate to ask whether we could better predict their impact using upstream solar wind monitors. To this end, we use the recently updated HELIO4CAST lineup catalogue (https://helioforecast.space/lineups) which includes ICMEs observed by Parker Solar Probe, Solar Orbiter, BepiColombo, STEREO A, and Wind to assess the local expansion of ICMEs measured at spacecraft in the inner heliosphere and at 1 au, comparing these to global expansion rates. We present examples of such spacecraft alignments that highlight the variability of ICMEs, including those where there are discrepancies between local expansion at different spacecraft, demonstrating both the importance and limitations of such in situ measurements for constraining future space weather forecasts.

• Venue: Room 02.18, Building 200B, Department of Mathematics, 3001 Heverlee
• Date: 4 September 2026 – 11:00-12:00
• Dr. Emma Davies is visiting KU Leuven on the occasion of the PhD defence of Angelos Valentino.