Connecting the photosphere to the corona : Reconstructing the Solar Coronal Magnetic Field
Abstract
The low solar corona is dominated by the magnetic field which is created inside the sun by a dynamo process and then emerges into the atmosphere. This magnetic field plays an important role in most structures and phenomena observed at various wavelengths such as prominences, small and large scale eruptive events, and continuous heating of the plasma, and therefore it is important to understand its three-dimensional properties in order to elaborate efficient theoretical models. Unfortunately, the magnetic field is difficult to measure locally in the hot and tenuous corona. But this can be done at the level of the cooler and denser photosphere, and several instruments with high resolution vector magnetographs are currently available (THEMIS, Imaging Vector Magnetograph (IVM), the Advanced Stokes Polarimeter (ASP)), SOLIS, HINODE , Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), or will be shortly available and future programmed missions such as , SOLAR-ORBITER. This has lead solar physicists to develop an approach which consists in reconstructing the coronal magnetic field from boundary data given on the photosphere. We will present our recent progress and results to solve this problem at the scale of active regions or larger ones such as full disk or synoptic scales, for which the large amount of data as well as their sparsity on the solar disk, require to develop particular strategies. We will also illustrate the interest of the reconstruction for characterizing the magnetic environments of prominences, emerging sub-photospheric structures and the pre-eruptive ones.
- Publication:
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SDO-4: Dynamics and Energetics of the Coupled Solar Atmosphere. The Synergy Between State-of-the-Art Observations and Numerical Simulations
- Pub Date:
- March 2012
- Bibcode:
- 2012decs.confE..50A
- Keywords:
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- SDO;
- SDO-4;
- SDO 4;
- SDO Workshop;
- SDO-4/IRIS/Hinode Workshop;
- Solar Dynamic Observatory