Pathways to Coronal Magnetic Energy Storage and Release

GSTDTAP

项目编号	1630454
	Pathways to Coronal Magnetic Energy Storage and Release
	Graham Barnes
主持机构	NorthWest Research Associates, Incorporated
项目开始年	2016
	2016-08-01
项目结束日期	2020-07-31
资助机构	US-NSF
项目类别	Continuing grant
项目经费	119945(USD)
国家	美国
语种	英语
英文摘要	This project science focuses on a fundamental gap in our knowledge of solar energetic events and their potential impact on the heliospheric and interplanetary environment - how to evaluate their potential size in terms of energy release. This project is unique in that it uses as statistics based approach to analyze characteristics of solar active regions. Being able to measure the stored and available energy, and to predict the size of an upcoming event will improve forecasting capability for solar flares and related phenomena such as coronal mass ejections and energetic particle production and propagation. These are the phenomena with direct impacts on human-dependent infrastructure and national security, hence improvements in forecasting eventually benefits large sectors of society. This project supports a postdoctoral researcher and a member of an underrepresented group who will serve as a mentor and Co-PI. Summer inters from the REU program will also be involved. The objective of this project is to understand the different pathways to the release of stored coronal magnetic energy. When a large amount of free energy is stored, some active regions release it in a few large events, while others release the same amount of energy in many smaller events. Why this occurs is unknown. Two complementary approaches will be used to investigate this: 1) using photospheric proxies for the energy for a large sample of events, and 2) modeling of the coronal magnetic field for a small sample of events. In each case, the energy will be computed for subareas within each active region to estimate the fraction of the total free energy that can be released in a flare. This will be compared to the GOES soft X-ray flux of the events. Verification statistics computed from discriminant analysis will be used to determine whether photospheric proxies for sub-areas of an active region are better then global proxies at distinguishing regions which produce large events versus those which produce only small events. If the analysis indicates that the free energy computed for sub-areas are more closely associated with the energy released, this will indicate that the local configuration of the field is more important than the global configuration. The corona will be modeled using the Minimum Current Corona model and nonlinear force-free field extrapolations. For both models, a detailed comparison will be made of the possible energy release pathways to the flares that occurred, and the location of the flare emission to the currents associated with the stored energy. This will provide insight into the underlying processes governing the production of energetic events.
来源学科分类	Geosciences - Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences
文献类型	项目
条目标识符	http://119.78.100.173/C666/handle/2XK7JSWQ/69946
专题	环境与发展全球科技态势
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Graham Barnes.Pathways to Coronal Magnetic Energy Storage and Release.2016.