Characterization of intermittent structures in the solar wind

M. S. NAKWACKI; M. E. RUIZ; DASSO, S.

Simposio; IAUS 300, Nature of prominences and their role in space weather; 2013

The solar wind (SW) is a suitable natural scenario to study the intermittent nature of magne-tohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence for systems with low dissipation rate. In particular, nonlinearwave-wave interactions can be characterized by the degree of phase correlation and by departuresfrom Gaussianity of the magnetic field. In this work, we studied in situ observations of magneticfield intensity from the spacecraft ACE, which is located near one astronomical unit from the Sun,in the SW near Earth. We compute the phase coherence index analyzing two sets of observations,each one consisting of approximately three month during 2008 and 2012, respectively. From thesesets of data we characterize some intermittent features of the magnetic field intensity correspondingto a solar maximum and a solar minimum.