Impacts of Extreme Space Weather Events on September 6th, 2017 on Ionosphere and Primary Cosmic Rays

Abstract

The strongest X-class solar flare (SF) event in 24th solar cycle, X9.3, occurred on 6 September 2017, accompanied by earthward-directed coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Such space weather episodes are known to cause various threats to human activities ranging from radio communication and navigation disturbances including wave blackout to producing geomagnetic storms of different intensities. In this study, SFs’ ionospheric impacts and effects of accompanied heliospheric disturbances on primary cosmic rays (CR) are investigated. This work offers the first detailed investigation of characteristics of these extreme events since they were inspected both from the perspective of their electromagnetic nature, through very low frequency (VLF) radio waves, and their corpuscular nature of CR by multi-instrumental approach. Aside data recorded by Belgrade VLF and CR stations, data from GOES and SOHO space probes were used for modeling and analysis. Conducted numerical simulations revealed a significant change of ionospheric parameters (sharpness and effective reflection height) and few orders of magnitude increase of electron density. We compared our findings with those existing in the literature regarding the ionospheric response and corresponding parameters. In addition, Forbush decrease (FD) magnitude, corrected for magnetospheric effect, derived from measurements, and one predicted from power exponents used to parametrize the shape of energetic proton fluence spectra at L1 were compared and found to be in good agreement. Presented findings could be useful for investigation of atmospheric plasma properties, particles’ modeling, and prediction of extreme weather impacts on human activities.