SPRG Seminars
SPECIAL SEMINAR--Friday, November 14, 2008 at 3pm:
"Analysis of CME events and the solar magnetic field"
Yan Li, UC Berkeley
Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) appear to be complex in many respects. The eruptions may originate from emerging or decaying solar magnetic active regions, and can be accompanied by intense solar flares or quiescent prominence disappearances. Remarkable progress has been made in understanding CMEs during the past ten years joining observational, theoretical and modeling efforts. While free magnetic energy is commonly believed to be the driver, the energy built up and the CME initiation processes remain in debate.
An ambitious goal of space weather studies is to simulate realistic CME events using solar magnetic field observations as boundary conditions of global MHD models. I present a few contrasting CME events and our analysis of available photospheric magnetogram and coronal imaging observations, and discuss what we may learn and contribute to the collective goal of CME predictions. The interplanetary counter parts of some of these CMEs were also possibly observed in-situ at L1 point, though uncertainties about their associations are inevitable due to large gap in observations.