Towards a Data-Optimized Coronal Magnetic Field Model (DOC-FM): Simulating Flux Ropes with the Flux Rope Insertion Method

Abstract:

Knowledge of the 3D magnetic filed structure at the time of major solar eruptions is vital or understanding of the space weather effects of these eruptions. Multiple data-constrained techniques that reconstruct the 3D coronal field based on photospheric magnetograms have been used to achieve this goal. In particular, we have used the flux rope insertion method to obtain the coronal magnetic field of multiple regions containing flux ropes or sheared arcades based on line-of-sight magnetograms and X-ray and EUV observations of coronal loops. For the purpose of developing statistical measures of the goodness of fit of these models to the observations, here we present our modeling of flux ropes based on synthetic magnetograms obtained from Fan & Gibson emerging flux rope simulation. The goal is to reproduce the flux rope structure from a given time step of the MHD simulations based only on the photospheric magnetogram and synthetic forward modeled coronal emission obtained from the same step of the MHD simulation. For this purpose we create a large grid of models with the flux rope insertion method with different combinations of axial and poloidal flux, which give us different morphology of the flux rope. Then we compare the synthetic coronal emission with the shape of the current distribution and field lines from the models to come up with a best fit. This fit is then tested using the statistical methods developed by our team.