04/12/2023
By Lynne Schaufenbil

Please join us for a virtual seminar on Thursday, April 20 at 11 a.m. "Interrogating Solar Flare Models with IRIS Observations and Looking to the Future" by Graham Kerr.

Abstract: Solar flares are transient yet dramatic events in the atmospheres of the Sun, during which vast amounts of magnetic energy is liberated. This energy is subsequently transported through the solar atmosphere or into the heliosphere, and together with coronal mass ejections flares comprise a fundamental component of space weather. Thus, understanding the physical processes at play in flares is vital. That understanding often requires the use of forward modeling in order to predict the hydrodynamic and radiative response of the solar atmosphere. Those predictions must then be critiqued by observations to show us where our models are missing ingredients. While flares are of course 3D phenomenon, simulating the flaring atmosphere including an accurate chromosphere with the required spatial scales in 3D is largely beyond current computational capabilities, and certainly performing parameter studies of energy transport mechanisms is not yet tractable in 3D. Therefore, field-aligned 1D loop models that can resolve the relevant scales have a crucial role to play in advancing our knowledge of flares. In recent years flare loop models have revealed many interesting features of flares. For this review I highlight some important results that illustrate the utility of attacking the problem of solar flares with a combination of high quality observations, and state-of-the-art flare models, demonstrating: (1) how models help to interpret flare observations, (2) how those observations show us where we are missing physics from our models, and (3) how the ever increasing quality of solar observations drives model improvements.

Bio: Graham graduated from the University of Glasgow with an MSci (Hons.) degree in 2012. He then obtained his Ph.D., also from the University of Glasgow, in 2017, supervised by Prof L.yndsay Fletcher. Upon completion of his Ph.D., Graham became a NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) Fellow at Goddard Space Flight Center in 2017, working with Dr. Joel Allred on the modelling of solar flares. His research focuses on understanding the energy, radiation, and mass transport during of solar flares, with a particular focus on the solar chromosphere. This is achieved via state-of-the-art radiation hydrodynamical modelling of the solar atmosphere and the analysis of data from NASA observatories. After the conclusion of the NPP Fellowship, Graham was appointed a Research Scientist at the Catholic University of America, and in this role he continues to be based at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center both as part of the PHaSER project and via various grants. He is actively involved in various efforts to address DEIA and early career researcher issues both at GSFC and in the wider heliophysics community.

If you are interested in attending, please contact Lynne_Schaufenbil@uml.edu for the Zoom link.