
About Me
I'm a 24 year old graduate
student from St-Andrews in Scotland. I obtained an MPhys
Theoretical Physics in June 2006 from St-Andrews University .
In September 2006 I started my PhD with the Solar Group at
St-Andrews. The 9 months of my PhD have been hectic and basically
consisted of programing, taking tutorials and attending courses
(post-grad lectures and grad skills). Somehow in between all this
I have managed to find some time to do research with my supervisor Clare Parnell.
So far we have been working on magnetic fragment tracking in the
quiet-Sun using the 'Downhill Method'. We hope to utilise the
tracking program to quantify photspherics processes in quiet and active
region. We are also looking into calculating photospheric and coronal
flux recycling times.
Outside of work pretty much most
of my time is taking up with rugby. I play for 2 teams: St-Andrews University
WRFC and The Saints WRFC
(which I'm captian of.)
Here's some rugby photos:
Summer Project
This summer I'm working with Dana Longcope from the Solar Group at Montana
State University. We hope to
improve estimates on the photospheric and coronal flux recycling times
by either using the minimum spanning tree method or singular value
decomposition. Also want to quantify min/max amount of
submergence/emergence occuring in the photosphere.
The
data I am using is MDI/ SOHO high resolution data of the
quiet-Sun, taken near a solar minimum. The data was pre-prepared by De
Forest (2004) to remove the effect of cosmic rays, rotaion of the Sun,
5 min oscillations and instrumental noise. All of these greatly reduce
the amount of noise in the data. The data I and up using is a set of
200 magnetograms (approx 5 minutes cadence). I identified all the
individual fragements throughout the frames (above a set cutoff) using
a 'Downhill' algorithm. See below:
After this I tracked the fragments through successive frames. At
present I am developing a bipole detection program, this is to help
finding the min/max submergence/emergence. I'm also developing
programs to determine the nature of 'births'
and 'deaths' of fragments in order to quatify the four
photospheric processes: emergence,fragmentaion,merging,and cancellation.
The next step
of this is to
extrapolate the potetial field from photospheric flux sources, which
will be treated like point sources. (This is a fair approximation as
flux is concentrated in these sources and compared to them, is
negligible outside.) Treating each source as a monopole is
sufficeient as the sources are small and all of equivalent size. The
extrapolation is to determine the connectivity of the field. At
this point I will be using some of Dana's programs. When the
connectivity has been determined for each individual frame it's time to
see how it changes between frames and what causes the changes.
Connectivity can change in two ways: through reconnection or
emergence/submergence.
Links
Contact Info
email:
lynsey@mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk
Or check out my webpage at
St-Andrews