arXiv subjects

Harry P. Warren

Publications and source records attributed to Harry P. Warren.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Evolution of solar and stellar coronal abundances due to magnetic activity

We discuss the evolution of solar coronal element abundances over an active region lifetime. Magneto-convection drives the complexity of magnetic fields that emerge above the photosphere. This complexity is dissipated, together with that of the overlying pre-existing fields, through dynamic events such as flares. A period of stable "ordinary" coronal heating ensues, before the concentrated fields are dissipated through interactions with the surrounding environment. The evolution of coronal abundances can be explained by the First Ionisation Potential (FIP) effect operating within this framework. We extend the discussion from magnetic activity on timescales of active region lifetimes (months), to the solar cycle (years), and stellar evolution (eons). The broad picture shows intriguing similarities that may prompt new investigations.

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arXiv2025

Thread Separation and Expansion Observed in Multi-Stranded Solar Coronal Loops

The theoretical expectation that coronal loops should expand with height contrasts with observations that typically show constant cross-sections. We investigate the idea that this discrepancy results from loops being composed of fine threads whose expansion occurs below the resolution limits of instruments like SDO/AIA. In this paper, we present two significant findings: (1) several extended loops exhibit measurable expansion, suggesting length as a critical factor in detection capability, and (2) high-resolution Solar Orbiter/EUI observations have captured expanding loops in active regions. For both AIA and EUI data, we observe cases where thread separation is directly visible as the loops evolve. These findings complement our previous work indicating AIA loops may consist of relatively few threads. Collectively, these observations provide compeling evidence supporting the multi-thread model and offer a potential resolution to the long-standing loop expansion problem in solar coronal physics. However, the high densities and narrow temperature distributions of observed coronal loops remain unresolved.

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arXiv2025

Revealing Flare Energetics and Dynamics with SDO EVE Solar Extreme Ultraviolet Spectral Irradiance Observations

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) Extreme-ultraviolet Variability Experiment (EVE) has been making solar full-disk extreme ultraviolet (EUV) spectral measurements since 2010 over the spectral range of 6nm to 106nm with 0.1nm spectral resolution and with 10-60sec cadence. A primary motivation for EVE's solar EUV irradiance observations is to provide the important energy input for various studies of Earth's upper atmosphere. For example, the solar EUV creates the ionosphere, heats the thermosphere, and drives photochemistry in Earth's upper atmosphere. In addition, EVE's observations have been a treasure trove for solar EUV flare spectra. While EVE measures the full-disk spectra, the flare spectrum is easily determined as the EVE spectrum minus the pre-flare spectrum, as long as only one flare event is happening at a time. These EVE flare observations provide EUV variability that have been used to study flare phases (including the discovery of the EUV Late Phase flare class), flare energetics (plasma temperature variations), corona heating (plasma abundance changes that support nano-flare heating mechanism), flare dynamics (downwelling and upwelling plasma flows during flares from Doppler shifts), and coronal mass ejections (CME) energetics (CME mass and velocity derived from coronal dimming in some EUV lines). We also introduce a new EVE data product called the EVE Level 4 Lines data product, which provides line profile-fit results for intensity, wavelength shift, and line width for 70 emission features. These emission features are from the chromosphere, transition region, and corona, and so Doppler measurements of those lines can reveal important plasma dynamical behavior during a flare's impulsive phase and gradual phase. With over 10,000 flares detected in the EVE observations, there is still much to study and to learn about solar flare physics using EVE solar EUV spectra.

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arXiv2024

An elemental abundance diagnostic for coordinated Solar Orbiter/SPICE and Hinode/EIS observations

Plasma composition measurements are a vital tool for the success of current and future solar missions, but density and temperature insensitive spectroscopic diagnostic ratios are sparse, and their underlying accuracy in determining the magnitude of the First Ionization Potential (FIP) effect in the solar atmosphere remains an open question. Here we assess the Fe VIII 185.213A/Ne VIII 770.428A intensity ratio that can be observed as a multi-spacecraft combination between Solar Orbiter/SPICE and Hinode/EIS. We find that it is fairly insensitive to temperature and density in the range of log (T/K) = 5.65-6.05 and is therefore useful, in principle, for analyzing on-orbit EUV spectra. We also perform an empirical experiment, using Hinode/EIS measurements of coronal fan loop temperature distributions weighted by randomnly generated FIP bias values, to show that our diagnostic method can provide accurate results as it recovers the input FIP bias to within 10--14%. This is encouraging since it is smaller than the magnitude of variations seen throughout the solar corona. We apply the diagnostic to coordinated observations from 2023 March, and show that the combination of SPICE and EIS allows measurements of the Fe/Ne FIP bias in the regions where the footpoints of the magnetic field connected to Solar Orbiter are predicted to be located. The results show an increase in FIP bias between the main leading polarity and the trailing decayed polarity that broadly agrees with Fe/O in-situ measurements from Solar Orbiter/SWA. Multi-spacecraft coordinated observations are complex, but this diagnostic also falls within the planned wavebands for Solar-C/EUVST.

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arXiv2024

Effect of Systematic Uncertainties on Density and Temperature Estimates in Coronae of Capella

We estimate the coronal density of Capella using the O VII and Fe XVII line systems in the soft X-ray regime that have been observed over the course of the Chandra mission. Our analysis combines measures of error due to uncertainty in the underlying atomic data with statistical errors in the Chandra data to derive meaningful overall uncertainties on the plasma density of the coronae of Capella. We consider two Bayesian frameworks. First, the so-called pragmatic-Bayesian approach considers the atomic data and their uncertainties as fully specified and uncorrectable. The fully-Bayesian approach, on the other hand, allows the observed spectral data to update the atomic data and their uncertainties, thereby reducing the overall errors on the inferred parameters. To incorporate atomic data uncertainties, we obtain a set of atomic data replicates, the distribution of which captures their uncertainty. A principal component analysis of these replicates allows us to represent the atomic uncertainty with a lower-dimensional multivariate Gaussian distribution. A $t$-distribution approximation of the uncertainties of a subset of plasma parameters including a priori temperature information, obtained from the temperature-sensitive-only Fe XVII spectral line analysis, is carried forward into the density- and temperature-sensitive O VII spectral line analysis. Markov Chain Monte Carlo based model fitting is implemented including Multi-step Monte Carlo Gibbs Sampler and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. Our analysis recovers an isothermally approximated coronal plasma temperature of $\approx$5 MK and a coronal plasma density of $\approx$10$^{10}$ cm$^{-3}$, with uncertainties of 0.1 and 0.2 dex respectively.

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arXiv2024

The Advective Flux Transport Model: Improving the Far-Side with Active Regions observed by STEREO 304Å

Observations the Sun's photospheric magnetic field are often confined to the Sun-Earth line. Surface flux transport (SFT) models, such as the Advective Flux Transport (AFT) model, simulate the evolution of the photospheric magnetic field to produce magnetic maps over the entire surface of the Sun. While these models are able to evolve active regions that transit the near-side of the Sun, new far-side side flux emergence is typically neglected. We demonstrate a new method for creating improved maps of magnetic field over the Sun's entire photosphere using data obtained by the STEREO mission. The STEREO He II 304 Åintensity images are used to infer the time, location, and total unsigned magnetic flux of far-side active regions. We have developed and automatic detection algorithm for finding and ingesting new far-side active region emergence into the AFT model. We conduct a series of simulations to investigate the impact of including active region emergence in AFT, both with and without data assimilation of magnetograms. We find that while the He II 304 Åcan be used to improve surface flux models, but care must taken to mitigate intensity surges from flaring events. We estimate that during Solar Cycle 24 maximum (2011-2015), 4-6 x 10^22 Mx of flux is missing from SFT models that do not include far-side data. We find that while He II 304 Ådata alone can be used to create synchronic maps of photospheric magnetic field that resemble the observations, it is insufficient to produce a complete picture without direct magnetic observations from magnetographs.

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arXiv2024

Assessing the Performance of the ADAPT and AFT Flux Transport Models Using In-Situ Measurements From Multiple Satellites

The launches of Parker Solar Probe (Parker) and Solar Orbiter (SolO) are enabling a new era of solar wind studies that track the solar wind from its origin at the photosphere, through the corona, to multiple vantage points in the inner heliosphere. A key ingredient for these models is the input photospheric magnetic field map that provides the boundary condition for the coronal portion of many heliospheric models. In this paper, we perform steady-state, data-driven magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of the solar wind during Carrington rotation 2258 with the GAMERA model. We use the ADAPT and AFT flux transport models and quantitatively assess how well each model matches in-situ measurements from Parker, SolO, and Earth. We find that both models reproduce the magnetic field components at Parker quantitatively well. At SolO and Earth, the magnetic field is reproduced relatively well, though not as well as at Parker, and the density is reproduced extremely poorly. The velocity is overpredicted at Parker, but not at SolO or Earth, hinting that the Wang-Sheeley-Arge (WSA) relation, fine-tuned for Earth, misses the deceleration of the solar wind near the Sun. We conclude that AFT performs quantitatively similarly to ADAPT in all cases and that both models are comparable to a purely WSA heliospheric treatment with no MHD component. Finally, we trace field lines from SolO back to an active region outflow that was observed by Hinode/EIS, and which shows evidence of elevated charge state ratios.

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arXiv2024

Determining the nanoflare heating frequency of an X-ray Bright Point observed by MaGIXS

Nanoflares are thought to be one of the prime candidates that can heat the solar corona to its multi-million kelvin temperature. Individual nanoflares are difficult to detect with the present generation instruments, however their presence can be inferred by comparing simulated nanoflare-heated plasma emissions with the observed emission. Using HYDRAD coronal loop simulations, we model the emission from an X-ray bright point (XBP) observed by the Marshall Grazing Incidence X-ray Spectrometer (MaGIXS), along with nearest-available observations from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) onboard Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and X-Ray Telescope (XRT) onboard Hinode observatory. The length and magnetic field strength of the coronal loops are derived from the linear-force-free extrapolation of the observed photospheric magnetogram by Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) onboard SDO. Each loop is assumed to be heated by random nanoflares, whose magnitude and frequency are determined by the loop length and magnetic field strength. The simulation results are then compared and matched against the measured intensity from AIA, XRT, and MaGIXS. Our model results indicate the observed emissions from the XBP under study could be well matched by a distribution of nanoflares with average delay times 1500 s to 3000 s, which suggest that the heating is dominated by high-frequency events. Further, we demonstrate the high sensitivity of MaGIXS and XRT to diagnose the heating frequency using this method, while AIA passbands are found to be the least sensitive.

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arXiv2024

Spectroscopic Observations of Coronal Rain Formation and Evolution following an X2 Solar Flare

A significant impediment to solving the coronal heating problem is that we currently only observe active region (AR) loops in their cooling phase. Previous studies showed that the evolution of cooling loop densities and apex temperatures are insensitive to the magnitude, duration, and location of energy deposition. Still, potential clues to how energy is released are encoded in the cooling phase properties. The appearance of coronal rain, one of the most spectacular phenomena of the cooling phase, occurs when plasma has cooled below 1MK, which sets constraints on the heating frequency, for example. Most observations of coronal rain have been made by imaging instruments. Here we report rare Hinode/EUV Imaging Spectrometer (EIS) observations of a loop arcade where coronal rain forms following an X2.1 limb flare. A bifurcation in plasma composition measurements between photospheric at 1.5MK and coronal at 3.5MK suggests that we are observing post-flare driven coronal rain. Increases in non-thermal velocities and densities with decreasing temperature (2.7MK to 0.6MK) suggest that we are observing the formation and subsequent evolution of the condensations. Doppler velocity measurements imply that a 10% correction of apparent flows in imaging data is reasonable. Emission measure analysis at 0.7MK shows narrow temperature distributions, indicating coherent behaviour reminiscent of that observed in coronal loops. The space-time resolution limitations of EIS suggest that we are observing the largest features or rain showers. These observations provide insights into the heating rate, source, turbulence, and collective behaviour of coronal rain from observations of the loop cooling phase.

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arXiv2023

On orbit performance of the solar flare trigger for the Hinode EUV Imaging Spectrometer

We assess the on-orbit performance of the flare event trigger for the Hinode EUV Imaging Spectrometer. Our goal is to understand the time-delay between the occurrence of a flare, as defined by a prompt rise in soft X-ray emission, and the initiation of the response observing study. Wide (266$''$) slit patrol images in the He II 256.32A spectral line are used for flare hunting, and a reponse is triggered when a pre-defined intensity threshold is reached. We use a sample of 13 $>$ M-class flares that succesfully triggered a response, and compare the timings with soft X-ray data from GOES, and hard X-ray data from RHESSI and Fermi. Excluding complex events that are difficult to interpret, the mean on orbit response time for our sample is 2 min 10 s, with an uncertainty of 84 s. These results may be useful for planning autonomous operations for future missions, and give some guidance as to how improvements could be made to capture the important impulsive phase of flares.

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arXiv2022

The First Flight of the Marshall Grazing Incidence X-ray Spectrometer (MaGIXS)

The Marshall Grazing Incidence X-ray Spectrometer (MaGIXS) sounding rocket experiment launched on July 30, 2021 from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. MaGIXS is a unique solar observing telescope developed to capture X-ray spectral images, in the 6 - 24 Angstrom wavelength range, of coronal active regions. Its novel design takes advantage of recent technological advances related to fabricating and optimizing X-ray optical systems as well as breakthroughs in inversion methodologies necessary to create spectrally pure maps from overlapping spectral images. MaGIXS is the first instrument of its kind to provide spatially resolved soft X-ray spectra across a wide field of view. The plasma diagnostics available in this spectral regime make this instrument a powerful tool for probing solar coronal heating. This paper presents details from the first MaGIXS flight, the captured observations, the data processing and inversion techniques, and the first science results.

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arXiv2022

Plasma composition measurements in an active region from Solar Orbiter/SPICE and Hinode/EIS

A key goal of the Solar Orbiter mission is to connect elemental abundance measurements of the solar wind enveloping the spacecraft with EUV spectroscopic observations of their solar sources, but this is not an easy exercise. Observations from previous missions have revealed a highly complex picture of spatial and temporal variations of elemental abundances in the solar corona. We have used coordinated observations from Hinode and Solar Orbiter to attempt new abundance measurements with the SPICE (Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment) instrument, and benchmark them against standard analyses from EIS (EUV Imaging Spectrometer). We use observations of several solar features in AR 12781 taken from an Earth-facing view by EIS on 2020 November 10, and SPICE data obtained one week later on 2020 November 17; when the AR had rotated into the Solar Orbiter field-of-view. We identify a range of spectral lines that are useful for determining the transition region and low coronal temperature structure with SPICE, and demonstrate that SPICE measurements are able to differentiate between photospheric and coronal Mg/Ne abundances. The combination of SPICE and EIS is able to establish the atmospheric composition structure of a fan loop/outflow area at the active region edge. We also discuss the problem of resolving the degree of elemental fractionation with SPICE, which is more challenging without further constraints on the temperature structure, and comment on what that can tell us about the sources of the solar wind and solar energetic particles.

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arXiv2022

Parallel plasma loops and the energization of the solar corona

The outer atmosphere of the Sun is composed of plasma heated to temperatures well in excess of the visible surface. We investigate short cool and warm (<1 MK) loops seen in the core of an active region to address the role of field-line braiding in energising these structures. We report observations from the High-resolution Coronal imager (Hi-C) that have been acquired in a coordinated campaign with the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS). In the core of the active region, the 172 A band of Hi-C and the 1400 A channel of IRIS show plasma loops at different temperatures that run in parallel. There is a small but detectable spatial offset of less than 1 arcsec between the loops seen in the two bands. Most importantly, we do not see observational signatures that these loops might be twisted around each other. Considering the scenario of magnetic braiding, our observations of parallel loops imply that the stresses put into the magnetic field have to relax while the braiding is applied: the magnetic field never reaches a highly braided state on these length-scales comparable to the separation of the loops. This supports recent numerical 3D models of loop braiding in which the effective dissipation is sufficiently large that it keeps the magnetic field from getting highly twisted within a loop.

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arXiv2022

Geometric Assumptions in Hydrodynamic Modeling of Coronal and Flaring Loops

In coronal loop modeling, it is commonly assumed that the loops are semi-circular with a uniform cross-sectional area. However, observed loops are rarely semi-circular, and extrapolations of the magnetic field show that the field strength decreases with height, implying that the cross-sectional area expands with height. We examine these two assumptions directly to understand how they affect the hydrodynamic and radiative response of short, hot loops to strong, impulsive electron beam heating events. Both the magnitude and rate of area expansion impact the dynamics directly, and an expanding cross-section significantly lengthens the time for a loop to cool and drain, increases upflow durations, and suppresses sound waves. The standard $T \sim n^{2}$ relation for radiative cooling does not hold with expanding loops, which cool with relatively little draining. An increase in the eccentricity of loops, on the other hand, only increases the draining timescale, and is a minor effect in general. Spectral line intensities are also strongly impacted by the variation in the cross-sectional area since they depend on both the volume of the emitting region as well as the density and ionization state. With a larger expansion, the density is reduced, so the lines at all heights are relatively reduced in intensity and, because of the increase of cooling times, the hottest lines remain bright for significantly longer. Area expansion is critical to accurate modeling of the hydrodynamics and radiation, and observations are needed to constrain the magnitude, rate, and location of the expansion or lack thereof.

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arXiv2022

A publicly available multi-observatory data set of an enhanced network patch from the Photosphere to Corona

New instruments sensitive to chromospheric radiation at X-ray, UV, Visible, IR, and sub-mm wavelengths have become available that significantly enhance our ability to understand the bi-directional flow of energy through the chromosphere. We describe the calibration, co-alignment, initial results, and public release of a new data set combining a large number of these instruments to obtain multi-wavelength photospheric, chromospheric, and coronal observations capable of improving our understanding of the connectivity between the photosphere and the corona via transient brightenings and wave signatures. The observations center on a bipolar region of enhanced network magnetic flux near disk center on SOL2017-03-17T14:00-17:00. The comprehensive data set provides one of the most complete views of chromospheric activity related to small scale brightenings in the corona and chromosphere to date. Our initial analysis shows strong spatial correspondence between the areas of broadest width of the Hydrogen-$α$ spectral line and the hottest temperatures observed in ALMA Band 3 radio data, with a linear coefficient of $6.12\times 10^{-5}$Å/K. The correspondence persists for the duration of co-temporal observations ($\approx 60$ minutes). Numerous transient brightenings were observed in multiple data series. We highlight a single, well observed transient brightening along a set of thin filamentary features with a duration of 20 minutes. The timing of the peak intensity transitions from the cooler (ALMA, 7000 K) to hotter (XRT, 3 MK) data series.

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arXiv2022

Detection of stellar-like abundance anomalies in the slow solar wind

The elemental composition of the Sun's hot atmosphere, the corona, shows a distinctive pattern that is different than the underlying surface, or photosphere (Pottasch 1963). Elements that are easy to ionize in the chromosphere are enhanced in abundance in the corona compared to their photospheric values. A similar pattern of behavior is often observed in the slow speed (< 500 km/s) solar wind (Meyer 1985), and in solar-like stellar coronae (Drake et al. 1997), while a reversed effect is seen in M-dwarfs (Liefke et al. 2008). Studies of the inverse effect have been hampered in the past because only unresolved (point source) spectroscopic data were available for these stellar targets. Here we report the discovery of several inverse events observed in-situ in the slow solar wind using particle counting techniques. These very rare events all occur during periods of high solar activity that mimic conditions more widespread on M-dwarfs. The detections allow a new way of connecting the slow wind to its solar source, and are broadly consistent with theoretical models of abundance variations due to chromospheric fast mode waves with amplitudes of 8-10 km/s; sufficient to accelerate the solar wind. The results imply that M-dwarf winds are dominated by plasma depleted in easily ionized elements, and lend credence to previous spectroscopic measurements.

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arXiv2022

Constraining Global Coronal Models with Multiple Independent Observables

Global coronal models seek to produce an accurate physical representation of the Sun's atmosphere which can be used, for example, to drive space weather models. Assessing their accuracy is a complex task and there are multiple observational pathways to provide constraints and tune model parameters. Here, we combine several such independent constraints, defining a model-agnostic framework for standardized comparison. We require models to predict the distribution of coronal holes at the photosphere, and neutral line topology at the model outer boundary. We compare these predictions to extreme ultraviolet (EUV) observations of coronal hole locations, white-light Carrington maps of the streamer belt and the magnetic sector structure measured \textit{in situ} by Parker Solar Probe and 1AU spacecraft. We study these metrics for Potential Field Source Surface (PFSS) models as a function of source surface height and magnetogram choice, as well as comparing to the more physical Wang-Sheeley-Arge (WSA) and the Magnetohydrodynamics Algorithm outside a Sphere (MAS) models. We find that simultaneous optimization of PFSS models to all three metrics is not currently possible, implying a trade-off between the quality of representation of coronal holes and streamer belt topology. WSA and MAS results show the additional physics they include addresses this by flattening the streamer belt while maintaining coronal hole sizes, with MAS also improving coronal hole representation relative to WSA. We conclude that this framework is highly useful for inter- and intra-model comparisons. Integral to the framework is the standardization of observables required of each model, evaluating different model aspects.

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arXiv2021

Solar Flare Irradiance: Observations and Physical Modeling

We examine SDO/EVE data to better understand solar flare irradiance, and how that irradiance may vary for large events. We measure scaling laws relating GOES flare classes to irradiance in 21 lines measured with SDO/EVE, formed across a wide range of temperatures, and find that this scaling depends on the line formation temperature. We extrapolate these irradiance values to large events, exceeding X10. In order to create full spectra, however, we need a physical model of the irradiance. We present the first results of a new physical model of solar flare irradiance, NRLFLARE, that sums together a series of flare loops to calculate the spectral irradiance ranging from the X-rays through the far ultraviolet (~ 0 to 1250 Angstroms), constrained by GOES/XRS observations. We test this model against SDO/EVE data. The model spectra and time evolution compares well in high temperature emission, but cooler lines show large discrepancies. We speculate that the discrepancies are likely due to both a non-uniform cross section of the flaring loops as well as opacity effects. We then show that allowing the cross-sectional area to vary with height significantly improves agreement with observations, and is therefore a crucial parameter needed to accurately model the intensity of spectral lines, particularly in the transition region from 4.7 < log T < 6.0.

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