ASAP Lunch talk - P K Manoran  - Regular Solar Radio Imaging at Arecibo: Evolution of Active Regions
Channel: Michael Nolan
Date: 2023-02-03

The sudden release of magnetic energy on the Sun drives powerful solar flares and coronal mass ejections. The key issue is the difficulty in predicting the occurrence time and location of strong solar eruptions, i.e., those leading to high impact space weather disturbances at the near-Earth environment. Regular solar mapping with the Arecibo 12-m radio telescope at X-band (8.1 – 9.2 GHz) has shown the potential for identifying an eruptive region when it rotates close to the central meridian of the Sun, about one half to a day in advance, and predict the strongest flares and coronal mass ejections directed towards the Earth. The X-band images of solar eruptions at mid-chromospheric heights, supported by the Arecibo CALLISTO solar spectrometer in the low-frequency range of 15 – 100 MHz at low-coronal heights, are crucial to studying the initiation processes of solar events.
In this talk, I will review results of the evolution of the brightness temperature of active regions in association with the development of magnetic complexity in the period between mid-December 2021 and today. Additionally, the recent discovery of a strong correlation between the X-band peak brightness of an active region and the number of visible sunspots present within it has tremendous potential for understanding the particle acceleration mechanism and additional exciting science.

00:28:24 csalter: PKM: What plans do you have to expand the frequency coverage of CALLISTO at the high-frequency end?

01:02:21 Christian Monstein: AO has a very low Level of rfi which gives good results.

01:06:26 Tracy Becker: I do love the correlation between the instruments at AO and the space-based images. Several different pieces of the same puzzle!