Thursday

Magnetic flux ropes are commonly defined as bundles of solar magnetic field lines, twisting around a common axis. Their evolution and potential eruption is of critical importance for space weather applications. Here a methodology is defined for the automated detection and tracking of flux rope structures within a simulation volume. Driving a magnetofrictional model using observed bipole observations, simulated flux ropes are detected over the span 15 June 1996 - 10 February 2014. Over this solar-cycle length span, flux rope footprints are mapped out, following cyclical trends in latitudinal distribution. Magnetic flux and helicity contained within flux rope footprints at the photosphere are quantified and compared over the span of the simulation. Separating the set of detected flux ropes into eruptive and non-eruptive, we consider the statistics of each set. With a methodology in place for flux rope detection, future work and applications are laid out for applying this methodology to additional simulated datasets.