Solar wind times of Fe and O signals

Because Fe and O charge states freeze at different heights in the corona, this positive correlation indicates that conditions at different heights in the corona vary as a whole. We identify short time periods in the solar wind that exhibit anticorrelations between the average Fe and O charge states and investigate their properties.

We aim to distinguish whether these anticorrelations are due to the related solar sources or to transport effects (e.g., differential streaming). We study kinetic properties of the solar wind related to these anticorrelated structures as well as heavy ion differential streaming in order to infer a possible relationship between conditions in coronal source regions and the reported in situ measurements. We employed a recently developed sliding-window cross-correlation method to locate anticorrelated structures in the solar wind composition measurements between 2001 and 2010 from the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE).