Quantifying the spatio-temporal characteristics of magnetohydrodynamic turbulence seen in HINODE/SOT images of solar prominences

The Hinode SOT instrument provides observations (images) of the solar corona at simultaneous high spatial and temporal resolution which span several decades in both spatial and temporal scales. We focus on specific Calcium II H-line observations of solar quiescent prominences with small-scale flows which exhibit a high degree of variability. We analyze these images from the perspective of a finite sized turbulent flow. A key property of turbulence is that it can be characterized and quantified in a robust and reproducible way in terms of the ensemble averaged statistical properties of fluctuations. Importantly, fluctuations associated with a turbulent field show similarity or scaling in their statistics and we test for this with both power spectra and Generalized Structure Functions. Realizations of turbulence that are finite sized are known to exhibit a generalized or extended self-similarity (ESS). ESS was recently demonstrated in Ulysses in-situ observations of magnetic field fluctuations of the solar wind emanating from the polar regions for which a single robust scaling function was found, suggesting a single universal character of the largest eddies in the finite range magnetohydrodynamic turbulent flow [1-2]. We find evidence of ESS in the SOT images and examine the details of this generalized scaling. [1] S. C. Chapman, R. M. Nicol, Generalized Similarity in Finite Range Solar Wind Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence, Phys. Rev. Lett., 103, 241101 (2009) [2] S. C. Chapman, R. M. Nicol, E. Leonardis, K. Kiyani, V. Carbone, Observation of universality in the generalized similarity of evolving solar wind turbulence as seen by ULYSSES, Ap. J. Letters, 695, L185, (2009)