M. Hagenaar, Identification of emerging and ephemeral active regions
In order to automatically find newly emerging ephemeral active regions we have developed an algorithm that detects magnetic bipoles in quiet sun. This method was applied to MDI full disk magnetograms, which have pixels of 2 arcsec. HMI will provide full disk magnetograms with 8 times higher resolution, so that simple bipoles will be detected as collections of many magnetic features. We can see this quite clearly in Hinode SOT. We therefore work on a new method to find locations of flux emergence. Magnetic flux emerges everywhere, all the time, and on many different scales: from weak intranetwork, to network concentrations, or (ephemeral) active regions. Magnetic concentrations also emerge around sunspots, as MMFs. Our algorithm to search the HMI data will have the option to choose minimum flux content, field strength, and spatial scale in order to only choose the emerging flux of interest.