Speaker
Description
Many forecasts regarding the propagation direction, size, and orientation of CMEs rely on simplistic models that make basic assumptions about the geometry, which are not known to be true. In most cases, these models are either a simple cone model or the very popular graduated cylindrical shell (GCS) model. Additionally, it is known that any analysis derived from using these models can be considered to be highly subjective. In all cases, the white light images captured from coronagraphs are only ever analyzed with models in terms of the overall shape, and not the actual intensity values.
In our work, we want to showcase our early developments and attempts to use more sophisticated models to both describe the actual shape of CMEs as they are observed and also create more realistic synthetic white light images that can be used to better derive global CME parameters. For this purpose, we use the distorted magnetic flux rope (DMFR) model to describe the overall shape into which we can embed arbitrary density functions to create synthetic images. It is also possible to nearly reproduce the GCS geometry, making it easy to compare with current methods. In the near future, it should be possible to use our approach to provide better information for down the line space weather forecasts regarding CME impacts.
