Very Fast and Accurate Azimuth Disambiguation of Vector Magnetograms

Abstract

We present a method for fast and accurate azimuth disambiguation of vector magnetogram data regardless of the location of the analyzed region on the solar disk. The direction of the transverse field is determined with the principle of minimum deviation of the field from the reference (potential) field. The new disambiguation (NDA) code is examined on the well-known models of Metcalf et al. (Solar Phys.237, 267, 2006) and Leka et al. (Solar Phys.260, 83, 2009), and on an artificial model based on the observed magnetic field of AR 10930 (Rudenko, Myshyakov, and Anfinogentov, Astron. Rep.57, 622, 2013). We compare Hinode/SOT-SP vector magnetograms of AR 10930 disambiguated with three codes: the NDA code, the nonpotential magnetic-field calculation (NPFC: Georgoulis, Astrophys. J. Lett.629, L69, 2005), and the spherical minimum-energy method (Rudenko, Myshyakov, and Anfinogentov, Astron. Rep.57, 622, 2013). We then illustrate the performance of NDA on SDO/HMI full-disk magnetic-field observations. We show that our new algorithm is more than four times faster than the fastest algorithm that provides the disambiguation with a satisfactory accuracy (NPFC). At the same time, its accuracy is similar to that of the minimum-energy method (a very slow algorithm). In contrast to other codes, the NDA code maintains high accuracy when the region to be analyzed is very close to the limb.