Papers for

solar observatory teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Machine learning estimates solar magnetic fields from UV and EUV images

MAGiDiff: Sampling the Photospheric Vector Field from UV/EUV Filtergrams

Abstract: Photospheric vector magnetic fields are foundational to modeling, understanding, and forecasting solar activity. These data are usually produced by inverting and disambiguating the full Stokes vector at multiple passbands, which is demanding. Here, we investigate how well we can estimate photospheric vector magnetograms from UV/EUV filtergrams. This problem is challenging and intrinsically ambiguous without polarization information, as the mapping from UV/EUV intensity to the magnetic field is indirect and ill-posed. We introduce MAGiDiff, a machine-learning-based method that uses denoising diffusion models to estimate vector magnetograms from UV/EUV filtergrams. As input, MAGiDiff takes a stack of filtergrams from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) / Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA); as output, it is trained to estimate the disambiguated vector magnetogram as seen by Hinode / Solar Optical Telescope-Spectro-Polarimeter (SOT-SP). We show that MAGiDiff can accurately mimic the Hinode ground-truth. Additionally, we probe MAGiDiff's understanding of the physical structure and magnetic connectivity. On full-disk, we show that it produces plausible structures for active regions. MAGiDiff generalizes across solar cycles despite hemispheric polarity reversal, and can be fine-tuned to other EUV instruments including STEREO/EUVI and GOES-R/SUVI. While clearly not a substitute for a dedicated instrument, MAGiDiff opens the door to new capabilities.

Wed 30 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Photospheric vector magnetic fields on the Sun are important for understanding solar activity but are usually measured using complex techniques involving polarization data. The authors developed MAGiDiff, a machine learning method that estimates these magnetic fields from simpler ultraviolet and extreme ultraviolet images instead. This method can closely imitate detailed measurements from advanced instruments and work across different solar conditions and instruments. Although it cannot replace dedicated measurements, MAGiDiff enables new ways to study solar magnetic fields using more accessible data.
Open → 2609.40043v1