Elemental Abundances in Corotating Interaction Regions at High Solar Latitudes

Abstract

Throughout 1993, as the Ulysses spacecraft traveled from ∼23° to ∼45° south heliolatitude, the HI-SCALE instrument on the spacecraft measured a recurrent series of enhanced particle fluxes with a recurrence period of ∼26.5 days. These particles are accelerated from a background seed population by the corotating interaction regions (CIRs) associated with a southern solar polar coronal hole. Using the Wart detector telescope of the HI-SCALE instrument, we have analyzed the elemental abundances of C, N, O, and Fe relative to He for 0.5 4.0 MeV/nucl ions and Ne, Mg, and Si for 1.0 4.0 MeV/nucl ions in the CIRs. We compare the relative abundances to some previous measurements reported from 1 A.U. as well as with solar photosphere abundances. We note that HI-SCALE measurements of the heliolatitude dependence of the oxygen abundance and spectrum as reported by Lanzerottiet al. (1994) suggest that a substantial fraction of the seed population for the CIR-accelerated oxygen is likely to be the anomalous oxygen component of the cosmic rays.