Since 2000, the Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) team has operated a high resolution full-disk global H-alpha network, consisting of six stations in five countries, to monitor solar activity round-the-clock. The stations are located at BBSO, Yunnan Astronomical Observatory (YNAO) and Huairou Solar Observing Station (HSOS) in China, Kanzelhohe Solar Observatory (KSO) in Austria, Catania Astrophysical Observatory (CAO) in Italy, and Meudon Observatory in France. Nominally, each station obtains H-alpha images every minute with 1 arcsec resolution. The PI and his team proposes to continue operating this network in order to provide valuable data to the solar-terrestrial community and to carry out research on solar filaments, flares, and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). In addition to providing valuable data sets to the solar and space science community around the world, the research team will carry out projects that will improve our understanding of the core components of space weather.
Proposed tasks include the automatic detection of filament eruptions and flares and the tracking of ribbon motions of 'two-ribbon flares' using H-alpha data from the BBSO global network, in order to study the relationship among the non-potentiality of active regions, filament acceleration, and magnetic reconnection rate. The PI's team also intends to combine network H-alpha data with Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) and Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) full-disk magnetograms to analyze the magnetic configuration of erupting filaments and overlying arcades, comparing those results to the structure of interplanetary magnetic clouds as derived from Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) magnetometer data. The PI will combine network H-alpha data with Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) hard X-ray data to carry out statistical studies of micro-flares and flares, and will continue to study large amplitude, long period oscillations of filaments in order to understand the excitation, damping, and restoring forces controlling the observed oscillations and their possible relationship to the eruption of filaments.
