Dr. Craig DeForest
Research Scientist, Solar and Stellar Physics Group
Department of Space Studies
Instrumentation and Space Research Division

Research interests and focus:

I am currently interested in formation and heating of the solar corona. The fundamental puzzle of solar coronal physics is the source and detailed release mechanism of the coronal heat. The solar corona is ~300 times hotter than the photosphere, with the energy probably being deposited as a mix of coherent wave energy and magnetically induced electric currents.

Much of my research work has focused on understanding the most quiescent structures in the solar corona, polar plumes. I seek to separate the physics of the rapidly changing corona from the background processes that provide the bulk of the heat.

Lately, I have been studying magnetoconvection and wave phenomena in the lower solar atmosphere.

Outreach

I'm currently the press officer for the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society. I've also been appointed press liaison for Solar and Heliospheric physics at NASA. In practice this means I'm constantly trolling for news stories to hand off to the PAO -- if you've got something, let me know. I'll be putting up some kind of relevant information on this site in the next few weeks.

Current research topics:

• Machine vision as a tool for analysing the Sun. We (I and Derek Lamb, a graduate student at CU) have been working on a general purpose feature tracker that can identify both EUV brightenings and magnetic flux concentrations. We have already been able to resolve the conflicting results of two other groups (Parnell and Hagenaar) who have used slightly different methods to identify magnetic flux concentraitons, and hence have reported different distributions of concentration size. That will be written up shortly.

• High frequency waves in the solar transition region. Using the high cadence TRACE sequences that were recorded in late 2002/early 2003, I've found evidence of a faint ridge spectrum (evidence of ducted waves) in time series of FUV (chromospheric / transition region) images. The waves exist at up to about 100 milliHz. The paper is in work now.

• PDL development. Perl Data Language is a fast, flexible, free alternative to IDL; in the course of doing my research I have implemented a few useful tools in this environment. One is a better image resampling algorithm, which was recently published in Solar Physics.

• Stereoscopic Magnetograph: This is an instrument concept that I am developing for high resolution future telescopes. It is lightweight and about 30x more photon efficient than current instruments. We anticipate its use on deep-space missions such as Solar Probe or Solar Orbiter, and on very high resolution telescopes such as the ATST. I'm currently preparing for November 2003 run at the National Solar Observatory, to breadboard the magnetograph and test the concept with real observatoins. I just submitted the paper to Astrophysical Journal; it will be published here after refereeing.

• Fluxon modeling: a promising new method of magnetic field modeling in plasmas. Here're the viewgraphs for a talk that I gave in October 2001 to NOAA's Space Environment Center, and a PowerPoint presentation showing recent progress in 2004.

• General solar physics: Here are the viewgraphs for a talk that I gave in January 2001 to the American Astronomical Society, on the state of solar coronal physics and space weather prediction.

Email:

deforest@boulder.swri.edu

Phone:

(303) 546-6020

Address:

Southwest Research Institute
1050 Walnut St., Suite 429
Boulder, CO 80302

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: 2.6.2

mQBtAzEOykcAAAEDALF557XtkJijuCAeDgp6y+VHWWvvBlelWPnntthI4FcRnkfa
8lGIRU/6u3zp9pltYTPP1hbfz583FkcpNYDl7e2XGAnqbyR3yJyvgzuVJAT1orem
ZQwiMVNeqjJx8l8llQAFE7QtQ3JhaWcgRGVGb3Jlc3QgPGNkZWZvcmVzdEBzb2xh
ci5zdGFuZm9yZC5lZHU+
=/LXY
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----