The postdoctoral candidate in this case expects to soon earn her PhD from Montana State University. In collaboration with senior scientists at the University of California at Berkeley, this postdoc will use methodologies from her ongoing PhD thesis to study small solar flares that are associated with major coronal mass ejections (CMEs) using the new Minimum Current Corona (MCC) model. She will use sequences of solar magnetograms showing the photospheric magnetic field evolution of a wide variety of flare and CME events to build three-dimensional topological coronal field models that will be analyzed with the MCC model. The postdoc's goal is to test the ability of the MCC model to accurately and quantitatively predict the energy and helicity of a wide variety of eruptive solar events. She has chosen to work with the team at Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory because of their experience and significant contributions to research on interplanetary CMEs (ICMEs).
The proposer notes that a quantitative physical understanding of the relationship between solar eruptions and ICMEs will improve space weather forecasts. This effort will therefore ultimately lead to advance warning of adverse space weather impacts and to better protection for satellite communications, navigation, and long-distance power distribution systems. This postdoctoral fellowship will broaden the representation of females in solar physics and enhance collaborations between the research groups at UC Berkeley and Montana State University.
This grant supported the Postdoctoral employee Maria D. Kazachenko to study energy and helicity in eruptive solar flares. During her two-year postdoctoral fellowship Dr. Kazachenko has (1) improved the speed and accuracy of the method to calculate the vector electric fields on the surface of the Sun, (2) tested the method using realistic solar test-cases and (3) implemented it using recently available vector-magnetogram observations from Solar Dynamics Observatory. These improvements have allowed for the first time to derive high temporal- and spatial cadence evolution of the energy flow through the photosphere. Image below shows an example of such ''energygram", i.e. a map of magnetic energy flows through the photosphere several minutes before a giant X2.2 flare on February 15, 2011. Dr. Kazachenko also did a series of runs to find flare-associated energies and helicities for several flaring active regions using the Minimum Current Corona Model. She found that using reconnection magnetic flux swept by the flare ribbons, instead of the theoretical estimate for reconnection flux from the potential field change, significantly improves the agreement between calculated and observed energies and helicities. The work funded by this grant resulted in improved techniques that could be used by the solar physics community and space weather modelers to understand how energetic procceses in the solar corona are driven at the photosphere. This work will lead to improved forecasts of flares and coronal mass ejections.
