Magnetic field has a central role in many dynamical phenomena in the solar corona, and the accurate determination of the coronal magnetic field holds the key to solving a whole range of open research problems in solar physics. In particular, realistic estimates for the magnetic structure of Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) enable better understanding of the initiation mechanisms of these eruptions as well as more accurate forecasts of their space weather effects.
Due to the lack of direct measurements of the coronal magnetic field the best way to study the field evolution is to use data-driven modelling, in which routinely available photospheric remote sensing measurements are used as a boundary condition. Magnetofrictional method (MFM) stands out from the variety of existing modelling approaches as a particularly promising method. The approach is computationally inexpensive but still has sufficient physical accuracy. The data-based input to the MFM is the photospheric electric field as the photospheric boundary condition.
The determination of the photospheric electric field is a challenging inversion problem, in which the electric field is deduced from the available photospheric magnetic field and plasma velocity measurements. This thesis presents and discusses the state-of-the-art electric field inversion methods and the properties of the currently available photospheric measurements. The central outcome of the thesis project is the development and testing of a novel ELECTRICIT software toolkit that processes the photospheric magnetic field data and uses it to invert the photospheric electric field. The main motivation for the toolkit is the coronal modelling using MFM, but the processed magnetic field and electric field data products of the toolkit are usable also in other applications such as force-free extrapolations or high-resolution studies of photospheric evolution.
This thesis presents the current state of the ELECTRICIT toolkit as well as the optimization and first tests of its functionality. The tests show that the toolkit can already in its current state produce photospheric electric field estimates to a reasonable accuracy, despite the fact that some of the state-of-the-art electric field inversion methods are yet to be implemented in the toolkit. Moreover, the optimal values of the free parameters in the currently implemented inversion methods are shown to be physically justifiable.
The electric field inversions of the toolkit are also used to study other questions. It is shown that the large noise levels of the vector magnetograms in the quiet Sun cause the inverted electric field to be noise-dominated, and thus the magnetic field data from this region should not be considered in the inversion. Another aspect that is studied is the electric field inversion based only on line-of-sight (LOS) magnetograms, which is a considerable option due to much shorter cadence and better availability of the LOS data. The tests show that the inversions based on the LOS data have large errors when compared to the vector data based inversions. However, the results are shown to have reasonable consistency in the horizontal components of the electric field, when the region of interest is near the centre of the solar disk.
