Abstract
TheSolar Orbiter(SolO) andParker Solar Probemissions have opened up new challenges for the heliospheric scientific community. Their proximity to the Sun and their high quality measurements allow us to investigate, for the first time, potential sources for the solar wind plasma measuredin situ. More accurate estimates of magnetic connectivities from spacecraft to the Sun are required to support science and operations for these missions. We present a methodology to systematically compare coronal and heliospheric models against white-light (WL) observations. WL images from the SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory (SoHO) are processed to unveil the faint structures of the K-corona. Images are then concatenated over time and are projected into a Carrington synoptic map. Features of interest such as the Streamer Belt (SB) are reduced to simplified geometric objects. Finally, a metric is defined to rank models according to their performance against WL observations. The method has been exploited to reproduce magnetic sectors from WL observations. We tested our results against one year ofin situmagnetic polarity measurements taken at near one AU from theAdvanced Composition Explorer(ACE) and theSolar TErrestrial RElations Observatory(STEREO-A). We obtained a good correlation that emphasizes the relevance of using WL observations to infer the shape of the sector structure. We show that WL observations provide additional constraints to better select model parameters such as the input photospheric magnetic map. We highlight the capability of this technique to systematically optimize coronal and heliospheric models using continuous and near-real-time WL observations. Several relevant practical applications are discussed, which should allow us to improve connectivity estimates.
Highlights
A new era in heliophysics has begun with the recent launches of the Solar Orbiter (SolO) and Parker Solar Probe (PSP) missions
Dust particles are ubiquitous around the Sun but a number of theoretical studies predict the presence of a “dust-free” zone, which might have been detected for the first time by the Wide-field Imager for Solar PRobe (WISPR) onboard PSP
The selection is performed among several distinct sources of magnetograms such as those produced by the National Solar Observatory (NSO) and the Wilcox Solar Observatory (WSO), including those computed with the Air Force Data Assimilative Photospheric Flux Transport (ADAPT) model
Summary
A new era in heliophysics has begun with the recent launches of the Solar Orbiter (SolO) and Parker Solar Probe (PSP) missions. The developed method is based on a comparison of the global models of the solar atmosphere with the location of streamers in synoptic maps from white-light (WL) observations. The continuous monitoring of the solar corona by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SoHO) has enabled a more systematic comparison between the location of streamers with the magnetic topology of the solar corona derived from PFSS calculations (Wang et al, 1998; Wang et al, 2000; Wang et al, 2007) and global coronal models (Gibson et al, 2003; Thernisien and Howard, 2006; de Patoul et al, 2015; Pinto and Rouillard, 2017). We discuss a connection with PSP and SolO observations
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