James Tolan's REU page


 

This is about my REU experience at MSU during the summer of 2005. It's under construction.
Heres a picture of me as a cheerio eating gangsta at Waterton NP in Canadia. MMMMmmm berry burst cherrios.......

 
 

me
 
 
My Project:
  The work I did this summer was focused on Surpa-Arcade Downflows during solar flares. These obects are visible in the image below, as the darker regions in the lower right hand corner of this flare, taken from TRACE data on April 20 2001 :

downflows

The model for this process is based on magnetic reconnection above the flare arcade:

reconnection cartoon cartoon2


My goal was to write a program which would locate these objects in a movie of a flare and track them as they descended down towrads the arcade. An objective system for detection would allow for properties such as velocity, size, length, acceleration, and location relative to the flare to be measured on a large number of such flares.  I also made a few movie mosaics of flare images, such as this one taken from Yokoh SXT data on jan 20, 1999:

mosaic

A more complete explanation can be seen in the presentation below.

Presentation

Some IDL programs I've used and/or written can be viewed here:

Programs


Fun Montana Stuff:

  Monanta, and especially Bozeman is a great place to spend the summer. Some of the activities I enjoyed while here was here include: fly-fishing (lots), hiking, cycling, backpacking, rafting, kayaking, trail running, going to Glacier and Yellowstone NP, and more....

Some Pictures


Links:

My Berekeley Astro Page 

River's Edge fishing report

Fins and Feathers Fishing report

NOAA weather