A Study of Fluctuations in Magnetic Cloud-Driven Sheaths

Interplanetary coronal mass ejections are at the center of the research on geomagnetic activity. Sheaths, highly fluctuating structures, which can be found in front of fast interplanetary coronal mass ejections, are some of the least known geoeffective solar transients. Using Morlet transforms, we analyzed the magnetic fluctuations in a list of 42 well-identified and isolated magnetic clouds driving a sheath and shock (Masías-Meza et al., 2016, https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201628571. We studied the fluctuations inside sheaths by defining two quantities: the power and the anisotropy. With a simple statistical approach we found that sheaths, in particular, those driven by a fast magnetic cloud, encountering a highly turbulent solar wind, and forming a high Alfvén Mach number shock have high levels of turbulent energy (∼10 times compared with the solar wind) as well as a low anisotropy (approximately halved compared with the solar wind) of their fluctuations. On the other hand, the effect of the shock angle and plasma beta in the solar wind are less straightforward: If the shock is quasi-parallel or the beta in the solar wind is high, both the turbulent energy in the sheaths and the anisotropy of the fluctuations are reduced; but for quasi-perpendicular shocks or low beta solar wind the turbulent energy and anisotropy can take any value.