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Title: ACHIEVING CONSISTENT DOPPLER MEASUREMENTS FROM SDO /HMI VECTOR FIELD INVERSIONS

Journal Article · · Astrophysical Journal
 [1];  [2]; ;  [3]
  1. Space Weather Laboratory, Code 674, Heliophysics Science Division, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, 8800 Greenbelt Rd., Greenbelt, MD 20771 (United States)
  2. Heliophysics Science Division, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, 8800 Greenbelt Rd., Greenbelt, MD 20771 (United States)
  3. NorthWest Research Associates, 3380 Mitchell Lane, Boulder, CO 80301 (United States)

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory is delivering vector magnetic field observations of the full solar disk with unprecedented temporal and spatial resolution; however, the satellite is in a highly inclined geosynchronous orbit. The relative spacecraft–Sun velocity varies by ±3 km s{sup −1} over a day, which introduces major orbital artifacts in the Helioseismic Magnetic Imager (HMI) data. We demonstrate that the orbital artifacts contaminate all spatial and temporal scales in the data. We describe a newly developed three-stage procedure for mitigating these artifacts in the Doppler data obtained from the Milne–Eddington inversions in the HMI pipeline. The procedure ultimately uses 32 velocity-dependent coefficients to adjust 10 million pixels—a remarkably sparse correction model given the complexity of the orbital artifacts. This procedure was applied to full-disk images of AR 11084 to produce consistent Dopplergrams. The data adjustments reduce the power in the orbital artifacts by 31 dB. Furthermore, we analyze in detail the corrected images and show that our procedure greatly improves the temporal and spectral properties of the data without adding any new artifacts. We conclude that this new procedure makes a dramatic improvement in the consistency of the HMI data and in its usefulness for precision scientific studies.

OSTI ID:
22666236
Journal Information:
Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 823, Issue 2; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0004-637X
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English