Automated solar flare spectral line characterisation for the DKI Solar Telescope

The Daniel K Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) is a 4m solar optical and IR telescope under construction in Hawaii, which will start science operations in early 2010. This telescope will produce up to 54Tb per day of imaging and spectropolarimetric data. The telescope field-of-view covers a small part of the disk at high resolution - corresponding to 30km on the Sun at a wavelength of 500nm. This project uses photospheric and chromospheric spectropolarimetric data, in which the four Stokes parameters are recorded at many points across a spectral line at each pixel in an image, encoding information about the atmospheric magnetic field as well as its density and temperature structure. We focus in particular on the spectropolarimetry of solar flares, in which substantial changes in the chromospheric and sometimes also photospheric spectropolarimetric data are observed. The overall goals of the project are 1) automated characterisation of Stokes profiles in these regions and 2) fast model-fitting of intensity and Stokes' profiles using a library of forward-modeled Stokes profiles.