The influence of spatial resolution on nonlinear force-free modeling

DeRosa, Marc, Wheatland, Michael, Leka, K. D., Barnes, Graham, Amari, Tahar, Canou, Aurélien, Gilchrist, S. A., Thalmann, Julia, Valori, Gherardo, Wiegelmann, Thomas, Schrijver, Carolus, Malanushenko, A., Sun, X. and Regnier, Stephane (2015) The influence of spatial resolution on nonlinear force-free modeling. The Astrophysical Journal, 811 (2). p. 107. ISSN 1538-4357

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

The nonlinear force-free field (NLFFF) model is often used to describe the solar coronal magnetic field, however a series of earlier studies revealed difficulties in the numerical solution of the model in application to photospheric boundary data. We investigate the sensitivity of the modeling to the spatial resolution of the boundary data, by applying multiple codes that numerically solve the NLFFF model to a sequence of vector magnetogram data at different resolutions, prepared from a single Hinode/Solar Optical Telescope Spectro-Polarimeter scan of NOAA Active Region 10978 on 2007 December 13. We analyze the resulting energies and relative magnetic helicities, employ a Helmholtz decomposition to characterize divergence errors, and quantify changes made by the codes to the vector magnetogram boundary data in order to be compatible with the force-free model. This study shows that
NLFFF modeling results depend quantitatively on the spatial resolution of the input boundary data, and that using more highly resolved boundary data yields more self-consistent results. The free energies of the resulting solutions generally trend higher with increasing resolution, while relative magnetic helicity values vary significantly between resolutions for all methods.
All methods require changing the horizontal components, and for some methods also the vertical components, of the vector magnetogram boundary field in excess of nominal uncertainties in the data.
The solutions produced by the various methods are significantly different at each resolution level. We continue to recommend verifying agreement between the modeled field lines and corresponding coronal loop images before any NLFFF model is used in a scientific setting.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	corona, magnetic fields
Subjects:	F500 Astronomy G100 Mathematics
Department:	Faculties > Engineering and Environment > Mathematics, Physics and Electrical Engineering
Depositing User:	Stephane Regnier
Date Deposited:	05 Oct 2015 15:03
Last Modified:	12 Oct 2019 22:53
URI:	http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/23921

Downloads