The Flow Of Granular Matter Under Reduced-Gravity Conditions

To gain a better understanding of the surfaces of planets and small bodies in the solar system, the flow behavior of granular material for various gravity levels is of utmost interest. We performed a set of reduced-gravity measurements to analyze the flow behavior of granular matter with a quasi-2D hourglass under coarse-vacuum conditions and with a tilting avalanche box. We used the Bremen drop tower and a small centrifuge to achieve residual-gravity levels between 0.01 g and 0.3 g. Both experiments were carried out with basalt and glass grains as well as with two kinds of ordinary sand. For the hourglass experiments, the volume flow through the orifice, the repose and friction angles, and the flow behavior of the particles close to the surface were determined. In the avalanche-box experiment, we measured the duration of the avalanche, the maximum slope angle as well as the width of the avalanche as a function of the gravity level.Comment: Accepted by "Proc. Powders and Grains 2009", Publisher AI

Improvements on coronal hole detection in SDO/AIA images using supervised classification

We demonstrate the use of machine learning algorithms in combination with segmentation techniques in order to distinguish coronal holes and filaments in SDO/AIA EUV images of the Sun. Based on two coronal hole detection techniques (intensity-based thresholding, SPoCA), we prepared data sets of manually labeled coronal hole and filament channel regions present on the Sun during the time range 2011 - 2013. By mapping the extracted regions from EUV observations onto HMI line-of-sight magnetograms we also include their magnetic characteristics. We computed shape measures from the segmented binary maps as well as first order and second order texture statistics from the segmented regions in the EUV images and magnetograms. These attributes were used for data mining investigations to identify the most performant rule to differentiate between coronal holes and filament channels. We applied several classifiers, namely Support Vector Machine, Linear Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree, and Random Forest and found that all classification rules achieve good results in general, with linear SVM providing the best performances (with a true skill statistic of ~0.90). Additional information from magnetic field data systematically improves the performance across all four classifiers for the SPoCA detection. Since the calculation is inexpensive in computing time, this approach is well suited for applications on real-time data. This study demonstrates how a machine learning approach may help improve upon an unsupervised feature extraction method.Comment: in press for SWS

Photospheric magnetic structure of coronal holes

In this study, we investigate in detail the photospheric magnetic structure of 98 coronal holes using line-of-sight magnetograms of SDO/HMI, and for a subset of 42 coronal holes using HINODE/SOT G-band filtergrams. We divided the magnetic field maps into magnetic elements and quiet coronal hole regions by applying a threshold at $\pm 25$ G. We find that the number of magnetic bright points in magnetic elements is well correlated with the area of the magnetic elements (cc=$0.83\pm 0.01$). Further, the magnetic flux of the individual magnetic elements inside coronal holes is related to their area by a power law with an exponent of $1.261\pm 0.004$ (cc=$0.984\pm 0.001$). Relating the magnetic elements to the overall structure of coronal holes, we find that on average ($69\pm 8$) % of the overall unbalanced magnetic flux of the coronal holes arises from long-lived magnetic elements with lifetimes > 40 hours. About ($22\pm 4$) % of the unbalanced magnetic flux arises from a very weak background magnetic field in the quiet coronal hole regions with a mean magnetic field density of about 0.2 to 1.2 G. This background magnetic field is correlated to the flux of the magnetic elements with lifetimes of > 40 h (cc=$0.88\pm 0.02$). The remaining flux arises from magnetic elements with lifetimes < 40 hours. By relating the properties of the magnetic elements to the overall properties of the coronal holes, we find that the unbalanced magnetic flux of the coronal holes is completely determined by the total area that the long-lived magnetic elements cover (cc=$0.994\pm 0.001$)

The Dependence of the Peak Velocity of High-Speed Solar Wind Streams as Measured in the Ecliptic by ACE and the STEREO satellites on the Area and Co-Latitude of their Solar Source Coronal Holes

We study the properties of 115 coronal holes in the time‐range from 2010/08 to 2017/03, the peak velocities of the corresponding high‐speed streams as measured in the ecliptic at 1AU, and the corresponding changes of the Kp index as marker of their geo‐effectiveness. We find that the peak velocities of high‐speed streams depend strongly on both the areas and the co‐latitudes of their solar source coronal holes with regard to the heliospheric latitude of the satellites. Therefore, the co‐latitude of their source coronal hole is an important parameter for the prediction of the high‐speed stream properties near the Earth. We derive the largest solar wind peak velocities normalized to the coronal hole areas for coronal holes located near the solar equator, and that they linearly decrease with increasing latitudes of the coronal holes. For coronal holes located at latitudes &gt;∼ 60°, they turn statistically to zero, indicating that the associated high‐speed streams have a high chance to miss the Earth. Similar, the Kp index per coronal hole area is highest for the coronal holes located near the solar equator and strongly decreases with increasing latitudes of the coronal holes. We interpret these results as an effect of the three‐dimensional propagation of high‐speed streams in the heliosphere, i.e., high‐speed streams arising from coronal holes near the solar equator propagate in direction towards and directly hit the Earth, whereas solar wind streams arising from coronal holes at higher solar latitudes only graze or even miss the Earth

Deriving instrumental point spread functions from partially occulted images

The point spread function (PSF) of an imaging system describes the response of the system to a point source. Accurately determining the PSF enables one to correct for the combined effects of focusing and scattering within the imaging system and, thereby, enhance the spatial resolution and dynamic contrast of the resulting images. We present a semi-empirical semi-blind methodology to derive a PSF from partially occulted images. We partition the two-dimensional PSF into multiple segments, set up a multilinear system of equations, and directly fit the system of equations to determine the PSF weight in each segment. The algorithm is guaranteed to converge toward the correct instrumental PSF for a large class of occultations, does not require a predefined functional form of the PSF, and can be applied to a large variety of partially occulted images, such as within laboratory settings, regular calibrations within a production line or in the field, astronomical images of distant clusters of stars, or partial solar eclipse images. We show that the central weight of the PSF, which gives the percentage of photons that are not scattered by the instrument, is accurate to better than 1.2%. The mean absolute percentage error between the reconstructed and true PSF is usually between 0.5 and 5% for the entire PSF, between 0.5 and 5% for the PSF core, and between 0.5 and 3% for the PSF tail

Influence of coronal hole morphology on the solar wind speed at Earth

It has long been known that the high-speed stream (HSS) peak velocity at Earth directly depends on the area of the coronal hole (CH) on the Sun. Different degrees of association between the two parameters have been shown by many authors. In this study, we revisit this association in greater detail for a sample of 45 nonpolar CHs during the minimum phase of solar cycle 24. The aim is to understand how CHs of different properties influence the HSS peak speeds observed at Earth and draw from this to improve solar wind modeling. The characteristics of the CHs of our sample were extracted based on the Collection of Analysis Tools for Coronal Holes (CATCH) which employs an intensity threshold technique applied to extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) filtergrams. We first examined all the correlations between the geometric characteristics of the CHs and the HSS peak speed and duration at Earth, for the entire sample. The CHs were then categorized in different groups based on morphological criteria, such as the aspect ratio, the orientation angle and the geometric complexity, a parameter which is often neglected when the formation of the fast solar wind at Earth is studied. Our results, confirmed also by the bootstrapping technique, show that all three aforementioned morphological criteria play a major role in determining the HSS peak speed at 1 AU. Therefore, they need to be taken into consideration for empirical models that aim to forecast the fast solar wind at Earth based on the observed CH solar sources.Comment: Accepted by the Astronomy & Astrophysics journa

A statistical study of long-term evolution of coronal hole properties as observed by SDO

The study of the evolution of coronal holes (CHs) is especially important in the context of high-speed solar wind streams (HSS) emanating from them. Stream interaction regions may deliver large amount of energy into the Earths system, cause geomagnetic storms, and shape interplanetary space. By statistically analysing 16 long-living CHs observed by the SDO, we focus on coronal, morphological and underlying photospheric magnetic field characteristics as well as investigate the evolution of the associated HSSs. We use CATCH to extract and analyse CHs using observations taken by AIA and HMI. We derive changes in the CH properties and correlate them to the CH evolution. Further we analyse the properties of the HSS signatures near 1au from OMNI data by manually extracting the peak bulk velocity of the solar wind plasma. We find that the area evolution of CHs mostly shows a rough trend of growing to a maximum followed by a decay. No correlation of the area evolution to the evolution of the signed magnetic flux and signed magnetic flux density enclosed in the projected CH area was found. From this we conclude that the magnetic flux within the extracted CH boundaries is not the main cause for its area evolution. We derive CH area change rates (growth and decay) of 14.2 +/- 15.0 * 10^8 km^2/day showing a reasonable anti-correlation (cc =-0.48) to the solar activity, approximated by the sunspot number. The change rates of the signed mean magnetic flux density (27.3 +/- 32.2 mG/day) and the signed magnetic flux (30.3 +/- 31.5 * 10^18 Mx/day) were also found to be dependent on solar activity (cc =0.50 and cc =0.69 respectively) rather than on the individual CH evolutions. Further we find that the CH area-to-HSS peak velocity relation is valid for each CH over its evolution but revealing significant variations in the slopes of the regression lines.Comment: Accepted at A&