Events

COFFIES is supporting the Heliophysics Big Year! NASA’s Heliophysics Big Year (HBY) is a global celebration of solar science and the Sun’s influence on Earth and the entire solar system. The HBY began in October 2023 with the annular eclipse and lasts until December 2024 with the PSP Perihelion! Each month of the big year has a particular outreach theme, which you can find listed in this article.

The theme for September is “Environment and Sustainability”!

We will preceed our science seminar with a brief discussion of this HBY theme.

Seminar Abstract: Constraining solar surface flows is crucial to understanding solar magnetic activity at different time scales. Accurate global solar surface magnetic flux distributions essential for modeling coronal magnetic fields, solar wind dynamics, open flux distribution, and solar cycle predictions. However, routine and direct observation of the full-Sun photospheric magnetic field (across all longitudes) is still challenging due to our limited field of view and high projection effects. Data-driven numerical models play an important role in estimating the distribution of magnetic field distribution including polar fields more accurately. The north-south component of the Sun’s global flow, i.e., the meridional circulation that transports flux from low latitudes and helps build the polar field, is utilized in surface flux transport (SFT) models to simulate photospheric magnetic field distribution. Since forecasting polar fields requires the forecast of the flow at a future time, it is necessary to reconstruct the flow behavior at the current time, so that future flow-patterns can be estimated. Data assimilation techniques like Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF), which utilizes observational data points to constrain the time advancement of a set of equations that govern the evolution of the physical system, have been adopted to reconstruct the meridional flow speed with solar dynamo modeling. In this study, I show how such EnKF methods, when used with a surface-flux transport model that captures the evolution of the solar photospheric magnetic field, can be used to make ensemble estimates of flow parameters into the future that will be used to drive the model forward to forecast solar surface magnetic field distribution.