Generalized Thermostatistics and Wavelet Analysis of the Solar Wind and Proton Density Variability

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the probability density function (PDF) of solar wind velocity and proton density, based on generalized thermostatistics (GT) approach, comparing theoretical results with observational data. The time series analyzed were obtained from the SOHO satellite mission where measurements were sampled every hour. We present in the investigations data for two years of different solar activity: (a) moderate activity (MA) period (1997) and (b) high activity (HA) period (2000). For the MA period, the results show good agreement between experimental data and GT model. For the HA period, the agreement between experimental and theoretical PDFs was fairly good, but some distortions were observed, probably due to intermittent characteristics of turbulent processes. As a complementary analysis, the Global Wavelet Spectrum (GWS) was obtained allowing the characterization of the predominant temporal variability scales for both the periods and the stochastics aspects of the nonlinear solar wind variability are discussed.