A New Field Line Tracer for the Study of Coronal Magnetic Topologies

Abstract

We present a new code for the tracing of magnetic field lines and calculation of related quantities such as the squashing factor in the solar corona. The Universal Fieldline Tracer ( UFiT ) is an open-source package that can currently take inputs directly from four well-established coronal models, with additional models planned to be made directly accessible in the future. This package contains tools to make use of large-scale three-dimensional field line maps to calculate volumetric quantities, such as the total volume of the open corona, or the fraction that maps to regions on the solar surface within some distance of a coronal hole boundary, which may be relevant to phenomenological models of solar wind speed such as the Wang–Sheeley–Arge model. Synthetic coronagraphs can also be produced rapidly by this package. We have postprocessed long-term magnetofrictional simulations to demonstrate that the separatrix web occupies a larger fraction of the corona during solar maximum than solar minimum.

Keywords

• Solar corona
• Computational methods
• Open source software