HARP - HMI Active Region Patches

Overview

A HARP (short for HMI Active Region Patch) is a coherent magnetic structure at the scale of a solar active region identified in one or more HMI line-of-sight magnetograms. HARPs are typically observed over an extended time interval (e.g., days), and tracked from one image to the next.

The HARPs are in the data series hmi.MHARP_720s, which is indexed by an integer identifier, HARPNUM, and by T_REC. The HARP will often be linked with a NOAA Active Region. This data series provides pointers to information covering the entire disk passage for each HARP in the HMI catalog, as well as summary information (e.g., integrated flux over the HARP), for each HARPNUM at each T_REC. The data series contains one segment, MASK, which is a mask image of the extent of the HARP at a given time.

The HARPs are found by analyzing the active region masks in hmi.Marmask_720s. (The masks are in turn derived from hmi.M_720s and corresponding intensitygrams.) All three of these data products are full-disk images, in helioprojective-tangent coordinates (that is, as projected on the focal plane, and not remapped to a latitude-longitude system). The MASK segment of the HARP data series indicates exactly which pixels in the magnetogram are part of the HARP. It is a rectangular cutout from the full-disk images referred to above, typically several hundred pixels in each dimension, with special values indicating whether a pixel is on-HARP or not.

The data series can be used by following the links to associated vector, line-of-sight, and intensity data. For diagnostic or summary purposes, plots of individual keywords, such as integrated flux or size of the HARP, are also useful.

Keywords

# SERIES INFO

# PRIME KEY INFO

# PATCH INFO

# SEGMENT INFO - links

# LINKS