Progress Report: Week 9-10

Weeks 7-8   Back to Home

What I Worked on This Week

At the start of week 9, I was a little stressed and overwhelmed by the fact that I only had a week and a half left before the final presentation, and was not sure if I would be able to finish everything I needed to finish before that. I finished determining the best values for the 3 parameters for all of the flares plus a few extra ones. Getting the energies from the parameters and the mechanical energies for the corresponding CMEs were easy as long as I understood the code since all I had to do was run them. The table of results on the flare side is shown below.

For the analysis, I created scatter plots for the 3 parameters and the flare heating against the GOES flare class, as well as those for transition region/corona radiation partition, flare/CME energy partition, and mechanical energy partition for the CMEs. I found some strong correlations that agreed with results from the previous studies, but for many of them 10 data points was not enough to make a strong conclusion. I'm very happy with a lot of the results I ended up getting, but it really made me wish I had more time to work on more events to add data points for a potentially better conclusion. Since there are too many plots to show here, see the final presentation for the complete data.

Lastly, as part of the preparation for the final presentation, I learned quite a lot about the motivation for studying this topic as well as the studies in this area that has been previously done, and that was very interesting. Preparing for the final presentation was a little stressful as I did not start early enough, but I feel that it definitely deepened my understanding on the work I had done. The slides I created for the presentation can be found here.

Table of results for the flare energy calculation

Final Comments

One of the reasons why I applied for this program was because I wanted to explore different fields of astronomy/physics beyond my classes so that I would know better about what my interests are. In that sense, I didn't know anything about solar physics before the program but I now know what kind of things are studied in the field today and it was more interesting than I had thought.

I spent the majority of the time commenting and trying to understand the code for the first few weeks, so I felt that I was able to learn IDL through those weeks and was able to use it without too much problem when I needed to in the later weeks. Although I'm not sure if IDL programming is a skill that I need in the long term, but I'm sure I will be able to apply it to other things involving coding for research at the very least.

I was also able to communicate better with Chunming as weeks went by, and felt a lot more comfortable with discussions during meetings. Similarly, 5 presentations I did as progress reports or midterm/final presentations helped me with being able to explain my work in words clearly, and I felt that it had gotten easier as I did more presentations. I feel that I gained more than just the technical skills through the experience, and I really enjoyed working at this REU this summer.

I will be going to the AGU fall meeting in December to present my work, and I'm really looking forward to it.