Abstract
Geocoronal Solar Wind Charge Exchange (SWCX) is the process by which
heavy ions from the solar wind undergo charge exchange with neutral
hydrogen atoms from the Earth’s exosphere, releasing photons at discrete
energies characteristic of the solar wind ions. This paper investigates
the solar wind types driving geocoronal SWCX. We find that during
periods of time-variable SWCX, higher fractions of every ion species are
recorded by ACE compared to the averages. Notably, a subset of the slow
solar wind characterised by a systematic lower temperature and higher
proton flux is surprisingly effective for producing SWCX. Given the
degradation of the solar wind composition spectrometer on ACE in 2011,
we explore the capabilities of XMM-Newton as an alternative sensor to
monitor heavy ion composition in the solar wind. Unlike the
distributions of other ion line fluxes analysed, only OVIII, extracted
via spectral analysis of XMM-Newton observations, display patterns
similar to the corresponding parent ion abundances from ACE (O8+/p).
Finally, we employ a Random Forest Classifier model to predict solar
wind types based on literature results. When combining proton data with
XMM-Newton features, the model performance improves significantly,
achieving a macro-averaged F1-score of 0.80 (with a standard deviation
of 0.06).