Analysis of behavior of solar wind parameters under different IMF conditions using nonlinear dynamics techniques

We select time windows in time series of solar wind for a group of magnetic clouds and plasmoids to analyze the dynamical behavior of the IMF B-z component and the V-x flux velocity component. Besides, we select time windows before the occurrence of magnetic clouds to analyze the solar wind behavior under "normal" conditions. These physical variables are characterized applying two techniques adopted from the nonlinear dynamics theory, the spatio-temporal entropy (STE) and the correlation time (tau). They were calculated for each time window using the chaos data analyzer (CDA) and visual recurrence analysis (VRA) software. The obtained results show that under magnetic cloud conditions, the IMF B, has the tendency to longer correlation times and lower values of STE. Besides the V-x component of the solar wind flux has a complex behavior in all studied cases. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.