Christian Möstl

ST Solar-Terrestrial Sciences

The 2008 Young Scientist Outstanding Poster Paper (YSOPP) Award is awarded to Christian Möstl for the poster/PICO entitled:

Reconstruction of magnetic clouds with two spacecraft: Examples from WIND-ACE and STEREO-WIND (Möstl, C.; Farrugia, C.J.; Galvin, A.; Huttunen, K.E.J.; Luhmann, J.G.; Ogilvie, K.W.; Biernat, H.K.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Christian is a PhD student at the University of Graz and the Space Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Graz, Austria. He is modelling multi-spacecraft observations of “magnetic clouds” in the solar wind. These are large-scale magnetic structures, containing helical field lines winding around a straight axis, much like a spiral staircase or the DNA. They are expelled from the Sun as “coronal mass ejections” and are known to cause the most severe geomagnetic storms. The step from single- to multi-spacecraft observations allows recovering global properties of magnetic clouds with increasing accuracy. Particularly, the application to recent observations by the NASA STEREO mission provide new insights into their shape and structure.