Earth-affecting Solar Transients

In the past decade, nearly continuous observations of the Sun and the inner heliosphere with an unprecedented wide spatial coverage from a fleet of spacecraft, including STEREO Ahead/Behind, SDO, SOHO, Messenger, Venus Express, ACE and WIND, in combination with a significant advancement of global MHD numerical simulation and theoretical analysis, have greatly improved our understanding of solar transients and the prediction of their potential impact on Earth.

This Topical Collection is based on the International Study of Earth-affecting Solar Transients (ISEST) project, initially launched in 2013 to bring together scientists from many countries to join efforts on studying solar transients. ISEST became one of the four research projects of the Variability of the Sun and Its Terrestrial Impact (VarSITI) program, sponsored by the Scientific Committee on Solar-Terrestrial Physics (SCOSTEP) for the period of 2014?–?2018.

Originally published in the journal Solar Physics, volumes 292 (2017) and 293 (2018).

Dr. Xochitl Blanco-Cano is professor at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). Her research areas are the physics of the solar wind and space plasmas.

Dr. Nariaki Nitta is senior staff physicist at the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, California. His interests include transient phenomena on the Sun and their possible impacts on the heliosphere.

Dr. Srivastava Nandita is professor at Udaipur Solar Observatory, India. Her research focuses on space weather, coronal mass ejections, and filament eruptions.

Dr. Cristina Mandrini is professor at the Instituto de Astronomia y Fisica del Espacio, CONICET-UBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is working on the emergence, evolution and interplanetary impact of the solar magnetic field.