Abstract
Solar eruptive phenomena, like flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs), are governed by magnetic fields. To describe the structure of these phenomena one needs information on the magnetic flux density and the electric current density vector components in three dimensions throughout the atmosphere. However, current spectro-polarimetric measurements typically limit the determination of the vector magnetic field to only the photosphere. Therefore, there is considerable interest in accurate modeling of the solar coronal magnetic field using photospheric vector magnetograms as boundary data. In this work, we model the coronal magnetic field for global solar atmosphere using nonlinear force-free field (NLFFF) extrapolation codes implemented to a synoptic maps of photospheric vector magnetic field synthesized from the Vector Spectromagnetograph (VSM) on Synoptic Optical Long-term Investigations of the Sun (SOLIS) as boundary condition. Using the resulting three-dimensional magnetic field, we calculate the three-dimensional electric current density and magnetic energy throughout the solar atmosphere for Carrington rotation 2124 using our global extrapolation code. We found that spatially, the low-lying, current-carrying core field demonstrates a strong concentration of free energy in the active-region core, from the photosphere to the lower corona (about 70 Mm). The free energy density appears largely co-spatial with the electric current distribution.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank the anonymous referee for helpful and detailed comments. Data are courtesy of NASA/SDO and the AIA and HMI science teams. This work utilizes SOLIS data obtained by the NSO Integrated Synoptic Program (NISP), managed by the National Solar Observatory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc. under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. This research was supported by an appointment to the NASA Postdoctoral Program at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), administered by Oak Ridge Associated Universities through a contract with NASA.
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Tadesse, T., Pevtsov, A.A., Wiegelmann, T. et al. Global Solar Free Magnetic Energy and Electric Current Density Distribution of Carrington Rotation 2124. Sol Phys 289, 4031–4045 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-014-0581-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-014-0581-z