Moissard, Clément and Butcher, C. and Ruler, E. and Richardson, J. and de Welle, B. Michotte and Steward, W. and Pritchard, M. and Valle, D. and Defayet, V. and Bernal, A. and Cavicchi, V. and David, V. (2025) The Speed of Interplanetary Shocks Through the Magnetosheath : A Toy Model. Geophysical Research Letters, 52 (7): e2024GL113. ISSN 0094-8276
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Before interacting with the magnetosphere, an interplanetary shock travels through the magnetosheath where its speed and shape are modified. Previous studies have reported widely different answers to the question of the speed of an interplanetary shock in the magnetosheath. Observational studies generally answer this question “macroscopically”, by measuring the time delay between detections of the interplanetary shock at two or more locations and inferring its average speed. In this letter, we instead propose a local predictive model for the velocity and show that paradoxical results from previous authors arise naturally from their use of different detection methods. Our model can be used to predict the propagation of an interplanetary shock in the magnetosheath with a simple laptop, yet provides results which are in broad agreement with much heavier magnetohydrodynamics and hybrid particle-in-cell simulations.