Bridging the Gap between Data and Users: A Spectropolarimetric Toolkit for CoSMO and DKIST

Solar magnetism has a direct impact on life on Earth. Both highly energetic Space Weather events as well as the ever-changing Space Climate, put our expansion into near-Earth space at risk, stressing the importance to better understand and eventually forecast the Sun’s magnetic behavior.

The polarized spectrum of the Sun encodes a wealth of information about the thermodynamic and magnetic properties of its atmosphere. In order to to extract this information we must model the observed polarization signatures by employing and advancing our knowledge of the radiative transfer of polarized light.

HAO’s Community Spectropolarimetric Analysis Center (CSAC) has the core mission to provide the observations, the theory and the tools that make it possible to determine the state and evolution of the Sun’s magnetic field, which is the ultimate driver of Space Weather and Space Climate. One element of this mission is to build a toolkit to analyze and interpret the polarized observations delivered by HAO’s CoSMO suite and NSO’s DKI Solar Telescope. This toolkit will help bridge the gap between the spectra and the community of users, and will support research-to-operations programs aimed at improving Space Weather forecasting.