SH21B-4120:
Image-Optimized Coronal Magnetic Field Reconstructions
Tuesday, 16 December 2014
Shaela I Jones, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, Joseph M Davila, NASA Goddard SFC, Greenbelt, MD, United States and Vadim M Uritsky, NASA Goddard Space Flight Cent, Greenbelt, MD, United States
Abstract:
The magnetic field dominates many of the most important and puzzling processes in the corona. In the absence of direct measurements, solar physicists have struggled for decades to accurately reconstruct the coronal magnetic field using photospheric magnetograms. Even with today’s excellent magnetographs, these reconstructions are plagued by several problems, among them long computation time, and poor agreement with the structures seen in EUV and coronagraph images. However no method exists for systematically improving the agreement between coronal images and magnetic reconstructions. Solar Orbiter and Solar Probe Plus will bring us closer to the sun we have ever been before, but taking full advantage of that opportunity requires accurate coronal magnetic field reconstructions so that we can connect the in situ observations offered by these unique missions to magnetic sources at the surface of the Sun. In this study we propose a method to improve coronal magnetic field reconstructions by optimizing agreement between the reconstructed field and white-light coronagraph images.
