Montana State University Solar REU Program 2010
Dustin Hickey
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Friday, June 18

Today I once again spent a lot of time at the XRT conference talks. After those I created a new version of my program that looks at even bigger gaps in time. Starting next week I will be looking at spots of open magnetic field in conjunction with the coronal holes. The spots of open magnetic field are found by modeling the magnetic field lines. In order to do this it requires data from an entire rotation of the sun. Thus the magnetic field data is over an entire month. This led me to see if some of the coronal holes persist over a time period comparable to the rotation of the sun. The plots below look at a time period that is half the time of one rotation of the sun. I looked at this time period because in a time period longer than that the coronal hole will then be on the other side of sun so it won't be as meaningful.



I did this for the June and August dates that I had been looking.



In looking at these I didn't really gain any more useful information. Also, some of the coronal holes will move out of view in this time period anyway. The only way that the place where there is a hole will stay visible is if it is on one edge of the sun at the beginning of the time period.

Thursday, June 17

I spent a lot of my day today going to various talks. We had one of our REU talks this morning. Today was also one of the days of the XRT conference here so I went to a bunch of the talks for that throughout the day. What I  worked on today was looking in more detail at some of the plots I produced yesterday. I focused mostly on data from August 15. Below is a plot of a zoomed in portion of the August 15 Carrington map.



The coronal hole that I zoomed in on changes shape over 40 hours but it is definitely still there. I ran my program that  looks at how the coronal holes change over 24 hour time spans. Below is the plot of that for this same date.



In this it can be seen that the hole persists over a 96 hours. It is interesting to compare this to the plot above it. In that plot the hole is shrinking over the given time period so one may assume that it will continue to shrink and disappear. When we look at the plot of 96 hours we see the coronal hole begins to shrink but it then starts to grow again.

Wednesday, June 16

Today I continued working with the data around June 20, 2001. I started by zooming in on an area of interest around the equator. The plot below shows this area over 10 hour intervals.



Although the coronal hole appears to change shape and size over this 40 hour time span, it is persisting. Thus, I decided to look at it in 24 hour intervals. The plot below shows all the coronal holes starting at this time in 24 hour intervals.



I once again zoomed in on the area of interest in order to better see what's going on. We can see that the hole persists for a few days and then as it starts to shrink, more show up near it.



In order to keep looking at this spot over time I changed the start time to be the beginning of the 23rd of June. From this we can see the new holes developing as the others shrink away.



Another date that I found to be of interest is August 15, 2001.



Tuesday, June 15

Today I looked at other dates to get a better idea of how these coronal holes change over time. One of the things I did was to start at the end time of the January 1, 1998 data. I wanted to see if the coronal holes persisted. The entire plot is below.



I then zoomed in on the same area of interest that I looked at yesterday. I also made a plot of the same area of 6 hours and again with 8 hours instead of 4 hours. There really wasn't a discernible difference between the three of them.



By comparing this to the plot I produced yesterday it can be seen that in the first 40 to 50 hours the coronal hole is expanding and then it starts to shrink. After this I searched around some dates during the solar maximum to see what kind of plots I would get. I searched through a bunch of dates that I picked. Most of the dates that I looked at had lots of interesting features. One of the dates that I decided to focus on was June 20, 2001. The plot below shows ten hour intervals starting on this date.



There are other dates that I have looked at that I will explore in more detail tomorrow.

Monday, June 14

Today I've been trying to get more useful plots from the same information that I used last week. One of the things I did was to zoom in on the area of interest in the January 2nd graphs. This was very simple to do as it only required me to change the range of the x and y axis. In addition to this, I took the program I had been using, hlmap.pro, and created two very similar programs from it. They do essentially the same thing but each one has a specific task. The programs take the same inputs as hlmap.pro. The two programs are hmpten.pro and hmp24.pro. The first program creates a plot of 5 different hole maps with ten hours between each. The second does the same thing, but with 24 hours between. Below are 4 hour and 6 hour time spans with 10 hour intervals of the same data from Friday. They are also zoomed in.





The picture below shows a more zoomed in plot of the 4 hour one, in order to better show how the holes evolve over time.