About Me
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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:



Aside from rugby I like snowboarding, hillwalking, socialising, watching films and reading.
Here's a snowboarding picture:





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