A New Method for Coronal Magnetic Field Reconstruction

We present a new, simple, variational method for reconstruction of coronal force-free magnetic fields based on vector magnetogram data. Our method employs vector potentials for magnetic field description in order to ensure the divergence-free condition. As boundary conditions, it only requires the normal components of magnetic field and current density so that the boundary conditions are not over-specified as in many other methods. The boundary normal current distribution is initially fixed once and for all and does not need continual adjustment as in stress-and-relax type methods. We have tested the computational code based on our new method in problems with known solutions and those with actual photospheric data. When solutions are fully given at all boundaries, the accuracy of our method is almost comparable to best performing methods in the market. When magnetic field data are given only at the photospheric boundary, our method excels other methods in most “figures of merit” devised by Schrijver et al. (2006). Furthermore the residual force in the solution is at least an order of magnitude smaller than that of any other method. It can also accommodate the source-surface boundary condition at the top boundary. Our method is expected to contribute to the real time monitoring of the sun required for future space weather forecasts.