Solar Dynamics and its Effects on the Heliosphere and Earth

The SOHO and Cluster missions form a single ESA cornerstone. Yet they observe verydifferentregionsinoursolarsystem:thesolaratmosphereononehandandthe Earth’s magnetosphere on the other. At the same time the Ulysses mission provides observations in the third dimension of the heliosphere, and many others add to the picture from the Lagrangian point L1 to the edge of the heliosphere. It was our aim to tie these observations together in addressing the topic of Solar Dynamics and its Effects on the Heliosphere and Earth with a workshop at the International Space Science Institute (ISSI), under the auspices of the International Living With a Star (ILWS) program. It started out with an assessment and description of the reasons for solar dynamics and how it couples into the heliosphere. The three subsequent sections were each devoted to following one chain of events from the Sun all the way to the Earth’s magnetosphere and ionosphere: The normal solar wind chain, the chain associated with coronal mass ejections, and the solar energetic particles chain. The ?nal section was devoted to common physical processes occurring both at the Sun and in the magnetosphere such as reconnection, shock acceleration, dipolarisation of magnetic ?eld, and others. This volume is the result of an ISSI Workshop held in April 2005. An international group of about forty experimenters, ground-based observers, and theoreticians was invited to present and debate their data, models, and theories in an informal setting.