Response of the groove in heliospheric Lyman-α glow to latitude-dependent ionization rate

Space Research Centre PAS, Bartycka 18A, 00-716 Warsaw, Poland

Corresponding author: bzowski@cbk.waw.pl

Received: 25 February 2003
Accepted: 16 June 2003

Abstract

I study the model response of the latitudinal profile of the heliospheric Lyman-α glow to various profiles of the ionization rate. The two profiles are characterized by their range separately in the north and south hemisphere, and by the contrast between the equator values and north and south pole values. These parameters define a mesh of the input ionization rate profiles, used to derive the output heliospheric glow profiles. It is shown that in the crosswind plane containing the Sun there exists a linear correlation between the north and south ranges of the ionization profile and the corresponding ranges of the glow profiles. This correlation does not depend on the contrast of the ionization profile. The contrast of the glow profile is almost linearly correlated with the contrast of the ionization profile, but this correlation changes with the change of the input profile width. Based on these correlations, a method to derive the latitudinal profile of the solar ionization rate from observations of the heliospheric glow at 1 AU is proposed.