The dependence of the helicity bound of force-free magnetic fields on boundary conditions

This paper follows up on a previous study showing that in an open atmosphere such as the solar corona the total magnetic helicity of a force-free field must be bounded and the accumulation of magnetic helicity in excess of its upper bound would initiate a non-equilibrium situation resulting in an expulsion such as a coronal mass ejection (CME). In the current paper, we investigate the dependence of the helicity bound on the boundary condition for several families of nonlinear force-free fields. Our calculation shows that the magnitude of the helicity upper bound of force-free fields is non-trivially dependent on the boundary condition. Fields with a multipolar boundary condition can have a helicity upper bound ten times smaller than those with a dipolar boundary condition when helicity values are normalized by the square of their respective surface poloidal fluxes. This suggests that a coronal magnetic field may erupt into a CME when the applicable helicity bound falls below the already accumulated helicity as the result of a slowly changing boundary condition. Our calculation also shows that a monotonic accumulation of magnetic helicity can lead to the formation of a magnetic flux rope applicable to kink instability. This suggests that CME initiations by exceeding helicity bound and by kink instability can both be the consequences of helicity accumulation in the corona. Our study gives insights into the observed associations of CMEs with the magnetic features at their solar surface origins.Comment: accepted by Ap

The New Economics of Teachers and Education

Rapidly growing costs of elementary and secondary education are studied in the context of the rising value of women's time. The three-fold increase in direct costs of education per student in the past three decades was caused by increasing demand and utilization of teacher and staff inputs, attributable to growing market opportunities of women and changes in the structure of families. Substitution of purchased teacher and staff inputs for own household time in the total production of children's education and maturation is a predictable economic response to these forces. On the supply side, the 'flexibility option,' that female teachers who take temporary leaves to raise children do not suffer subsequent wage loss upon reentry, is shown to be an important attraction of the teaching profession to women. Other college educated women suffer reentry wage losses of 10 percent per year of leave. The estimated value of flexibility in teaching is 5 percent of life-cycle earnings and will fall as labor force interruptions of women for child-rearing become less frequent. Both supply and demand considerations suggest that the direct costs of education per student will continue to increase in the future, independent of political and other organization reforms of schools.

A Hybrid Radial Basis Function - Pseudospectral Method for Thermal Convection in a 3-D Spherical Shell

A novel hybrid spectral method that combines radial basis function (RBF) and Chebyshev pseudospectral (PS) methods in a “2+1” approach is presented for numerically simulating thermal convection in a 3-D spherical shell. This is the first study to apply RBFs to a full 3D physical model in spherical geometry. In addition to being spectrally accurate, RBFs are not defined in terms of any surface based coordinate system such as spherical coordinates. As a result, when used in the lateral directions, as in this study, they completely circumvent the pole issue with the further advantage that nodes can be “scattered” over the surface of a sphere. In the radial direction, Chebyshev polynomials are used, which are also spectrally accurate and provide the necessary clustering near the boundaries to resolve boundary layers. Applications of this new hybrid methodology are given to the problem of convection in the Earth’s mantle,which is modeled by a Boussinesq fluid at infinite Prandtl number. To see whether this numerical technique warrants further investigation, the study limits itself to an isoviscous mantle.Benchmark comparisons are presented with other currently used mantle convection codes for Rayleigh number 7 · 103 and 105. The algorithmic simplicity of the code (mostly due to RBFs)allows it to be written in less than 400 lines of Matlab and run on a single workstation. We find that our method is very competitive with those currently used in the literature

A Radial Basis Function Method for the Shallow Water Equations on a Sphere

The paper derives the first known numerical shallow water model on the sphere using radial basis function (RBF) spatial discretisation, a novel numerical methodology that does not require any grid or mesh. In order to perform a study with regard to its spatial and temporal errors, two nonlinear test cases with known analytical solutions are considered. The first is global steady-state flow with a compactly supported velocity field while the second is unsteady flow where features in the flow must be kept intact without dis- persion. This behavior is achieved by introducing forcing terms in the shallow water equations. Error and time stability studies are performed both as the number of nodes is uniformly increased and the shape parameter of the RBF is varied, especially in the flat basis function limit. Results show that the RBF method is spectral, giving exceptionally high accuracy for low number of basis functions while being able to take unusually large time-steps. In order to put it in the context of other commonly used global spectral methods on a sphere, comparisons are given with respect to spherical harmonics, double Fourier series, and spectral element methods

Transport Schemes on a Sphere Using Radial Basis Functions

The aim of this work is to introduce the physics community to the high performance of radial basis functions (RBFs) compared to other spectral methods for modeling transport (pure advection) and to provide the first known application of the RBF methodology to hyperbolic partial differential equations on a sphere. First, it is shown that even when the advective operator is posed in spherical coordinates (thus having singularities at the poles), the RBF formulation of it is completely singularity-free. Then, two classical test cases are conducted: 1) linear advection, where the initial condition is simply transported around the sphere and 2) deformational flow (idealized cyclogenesis), where an angular velocity is applied to the initial condition, spinning it up around an axis of rotation. The results show that RBFs allow for a much lower spatial resolution (i.e. lower number of nodes) while being able to take unusually large time-steps to achieve the same accuracy as compared to other commonly used spectral methods on a sphere such as spherical harmonics, double Fourier series, and spectral element methods. Furthermore, RBFs are algorithmically much simpler to program

ROAM: a Radial-basis-function Optimization Approximation Method for diagnosing the three-dimensional coronal magnetic field

The Coronal Multichannel Polarimeter (CoMP) routinely performs coronal polarimetric measurements using the Fe XIII 10747 $\AA$ and 10798 $\AA$ lines, which are sensitive to the coronal magnetic field. However, inverting such polarimetric measurements into magnetic field data is a difficult task because the corona is optically thin at these wavelengths and the observed signal is therefore the integrated emission of all the plasma along the line of sight. To overcome this difficulty, we take on a new approach that combines a parameterized 3D magnetic field model with forward modeling of the polarization signal. For that purpose, we develop a new, fast and efficient, optimization method for model-data fitting: the Radial-basis-functions Optimization Approximation Method (ROAM). Model-data fitting is achieved by optimizing a user-specified log-likelihood function that quantifies the differences between the observed polarization signal and its synthetic/predicted analogue. Speed and efficiency are obtained by combining sparse evaluation of the magnetic model with radial-basis-function (RBF) decomposition of the log-likelihood function. The RBF decomposition provides an analytical expression for the log-likelihood function that is used to inexpensively estimate the set of parameter values optimizing it. We test and validate ROAM on a synthetic test bed of a coronal magnetic flux rope and show that it performs well with a significantly sparse sample of the parameter space. We conclude that our optimization method is well-suited for fast and efficient model-data fitting and can be exploited for converting coronal polarimetric measurements, such as the ones provided by CoMP, into coronal magnetic field data.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figures, accepted in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Science