Wednesday

Transverse (or “Alfvénic”) waves have been widely observed in both the solar wind and corona. These waves are theorised to be the one of the primary drivers of coronal heating and solar wind acceleration. However, few direct measurements – and even fewer statistical studies – have been made of transverse waves in the corona. Additionally, observations of transverse waves in polar plumes (Thurgood et al. 2014) have raised some questions concerning the total energy carried by the waves.

In this work we utilize an automated version of the Northumbria University Wave Tracking (NUWT) code and report the distributions of parameters for hundreds of transverse waves observed using data from the 171 Å channel of SDO / AIA. We explore both spatial variations between coronal holes, quiet Sun, and active regions as well as temporal variations at select times over the solar cycle. We also investigate the superposition of multiple waves propagating along the same structures and, lastly, discuss the total measured energy within the context of current theories. Our analysis methods can be readily adapted to a wide range of imaging data and the reported wave energies may place important constraints on wave driven models of the solar corona.