A New Method of Coronal Magnetic Field Reconstruction

In the past two decades, diverse methods and computer codes for reconstruction of coronal magnetic fields have been developed. Some of them can reproduce a known analytic solution quite well when the magnetic field vector is fully specified by the known solution at the domain boundaries. In practical problems, however, we do not know the boundary conditions in the computational domain except the photospheric boundary, where vector magnetogram data are provided. We have developed a new, simple variational method employing vector potentials. We have tested the computational code based on this method for problems with known solutions and those with actual photospheric data. When solutions are fully given at all boundaries, the accuracy of our method is almost comparable to best performing methods in the market. When magnetic field vectors are only given at the photospheric boundary, our method excels other methods in "figures of merit" devised by Schrijver et al. (2006). Our method is expected to contribute to the real time monitoring of the sun required for future space weather prediction.