Identifying and Tracking Solar Flux Ropes in Simulation Data and Deflection Analysis of AR11176 and AR12473 Flux Ropes

Abstract

To improve our understanding of how space weather affects our near-Earth space environment, magnetic field modelling of solar eruptive structures is essential. In particular, modelling flux ropes in a time-dependent manner to investigate their destabilization in the low corona as well as their morphological evolution and propagation can yield important information about the eruption's impact at Earth. However, finding and tracking the magnetic field lines that pertain to the flux rope in simulation data is a non-trivial task. Therefore, we developed a methodology to extract and track flux ropes in a semi-automatic way, using a combination of some flux rope proxies (like the twist parameter) and mathematical morphology algorithms. This procedure is also wrapped into a graphical user interface (GUI) to increase the user-friendliness of the methodology. We subsequently apply this methodology to time-dependent magnetofrictional method (TMFM) simulations of active regions AR12473 and AR11176. For the former, we chose to simulate a time window which featured an eruption, while for the latter, we model the active region at a time where there was only mild activity. We then analyse the propagation of the flux ropes through the low corona. We find that the eruptive flux rope of AR12473 clearly shows significant changes in the propagation direction with deflection angles peaking at 60 degrees. The AR11176 flux rope appears to be more stable, but still features non-negligible deflections peaking at about 40 degrees.