Proton Monitor shows Wind Speed dropped and density is up

Proton Monitor shows Wind Speed dropped and density is up today and this could signal tomorrow to be a strong events day globally.

The Proton Monitor (PM) is a subsensor of the MTOF instrument, which is one of the 3 time-of-flight instruments comprising the CELIAS experiment on the SOHO spacecraft. MTOF determines high resolution mass spectra of heavy solar wind ions and uses a very wide bandwidth energy-per-charge analyzer to maximize counting statistics. The PM was designed to assist in the interpretation of MTOF data and for that reason uses a similar wide bandwidth analyzer that limits the accuracy of derived solar wind parameters. In addition, since SOHO is not a spinning spacecraft, the deflection system was designed to have a wide angular acceptance (+- 15 deg). For technical reasons this leads to an ambiguity between incident angle and incident energy/charge; this ambiguity was designed into the PM to match as closely as possible the behavior of the deflection system for the main MTOF sensor. It is not the energy/charge but rather the mass/charge that is needed for interpretation of the MTOF mass data.
The data presented here are derived from sets of 6 rates (one for each voltage step of the PM deflection system) obtained every 30 seconds. The voltage steps are spaced logarithmically (about 60% step size) from about 0.3 to 3 kV. At a given voltage step the energy per charge dynamic range is slightly more than a factor of 2. The overall geometry factor of the PM is about 1.0 x 10**-4 cm**2.