Enhancements to Hinode/SOT-SP Vector Magnetic Field Data Products

The Solar Optical Telescope Spectro-Polarimeter (SOT-SP), on board the Hinode spacecraft (launched in 2006), is a scanning-slit spectrograph that continues to provide polarization spectra useful for inferring the vector (three-component) magnetic field at the solar photosphere. SOT-SP achieves this goal by obtaining line profiles of two magnetically sensitive lines, namely the Fe I 6302 Angstrom doublet, using a 0.16"×164" slit as it scans a region of interest. Once the data are merged, a Milne-Eddington based spectropolarimetric inversion scheme is used to infer multiple physical parameters in the solar photosphere, including the vector magnetic field, from the calibrated polarization spectra. All of these data are publicly available once the processing has occurred.

As of this year, the Hinode/SOT team is also making available the disambiguated vector magnetic field and the re-projected heliographic components of the field. In making the disambiguated vector field data product, the 180° ambiguity in the plane-of-sky component of the vector magnetic field inherent in the spectropolarimetric inversion process has been resolved. This ambiguity is resolved using the Minimum-Energy algorithm, which is the same algorithm used within the pipeline producing the vector-magnetogram data product for the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager aboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory. The heliographic field components (B_phi, B_theta, B_r) on the same grid as the inverted data are also now provided. This poster provides more details about these data product enhancements, and some examples on how the scientific community may readily obtain these data.