Upcoming Events
Colloquium: GATES: A Network for Synoptic Space Weather Observation - Nov 20, 2024
Colloquium: A Story Between Dragon King and Aurora in the World of MAGE - Dec 4, 2024
Latest News
A Magnetohydrodynamic Mechanism for the Formation of Solar Polar Vortices
HAO scientist Mausumi Dikpati's recent significant publication entitled "A Magnetohydrodynamic Mechanism for the Formation of Solar Polar Vortices" is highlighted by NSF-NCAR news website. Dikpati and her co-authors report the first magnetohydrodynamic nonlinear simulations for the formation and evolution of solar polar vortices using a near-surface magnetohydrodynamic shallow-water model.
A new era of solar observation
For the first time, scientists, including lead author Newkirk graduate student Zihao Yang, have taken near-daily measurements of the Sun’s global coronal magnetic field, a region of the Sun that has only been observed irregularly in the past. The resulting observations are providing valuable insights into the processes that drive the intense solar storms that impact fundamental technologies, and thus lives and livelihoods, here on Earth. See NSF NCAR News article.
HAO flew observers to MLSO to observe the Sun during the solar eclipse
On April 8, 2024, the day of the total solar eclipse, HAO observers Ben Berkey (site manager) and Lisa Perez-Gonzalez flew by helicopter to the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory (MLSO) located at 11,200 feet on the north face of Mauna Loa to observe the Sun’s corona using the MLSO coronagraphs.
Latest Research Highlights
Spectra of solar shallow-water waves from bright point observations
Breno Raphaldini, Mausumi Dikpati, Scott W. McIntosh, and Andre S. W. Teruya, utilize 3 years of global, synchronous observations of coronal bright point densities to obtain empirical signatures of dispersion relations that can be attributed to the simulated waves in tachocline. By tracking the bright point densities at selected latitudes, they compute their wave-number X frequency spectra.
A data-driven MHD simulation of the 2011-02-15 coronal mass ejection from Active Region NOAA 11158
Yuhong Fan, Maria Kazachenko, Andrei Afanasev, and George Fisher present a boundary data-driven magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) simulation of the 2011-02-15 coronal mass ejection (CME) event of Active Region (AR) NOAA 11158. The simulation is driven at the lower boundary with an electric field derived from the normal magnetic field and the vertical electric current measured from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) Helioseismic Magnetic Imager (HMI) vector magnetograms.
Observing the evolution of the Sun’s global coronal magnetic field
Zihao Yang, Hui Tian, Steven Tomczyk, Xianyu Liu, Sarah Gibson, Richard Morton, Cooper Downs, using the Upgraded Coronal Multi-channel Polarimeter, have obtained magnetograms of the global corona above the solar limb over approximately eight months.