Automated Temperature and Emission Measure Analysis of Coronal Loops and Active Regions Observed with AIA/SDO

We developed numerical codes designed for automated analysis of AIA/SDO image datasets in the 6 coronal filters, including: (i) coalignment test between different wavelengths with measurements of the altitude of the EUV-absorbing chromosphere, (ii) self-calibration by empirical correction of instrumental response functions, (iii) automated generation of differential emission measure (DEM) distributions with peak temperature maps Tp(x, y) and emission measure maps EMp(x, y) of the full Sun or active region areas, (iv) composite DEM distributions dEM(T )/dT of active regions or subareas; (v) automated detection of coronal loops, and (vi) automated background subtraction and thermal analysis of coronal loops, which yields statistics of loop temperatures Te, temperature widths σT , emission measures EM , electron densities ne, and loop widths w. The combination of these numerical codes allows for automated and objective processing of a large number of coronal loops. As an example, we present the results of an application to the active region NOAA 11158, observed on 2011-Feb-15, shortly before it produced the largest (X2.2) flare during the current solar cycle. We detect 570 loop segments at temperatures in the entire range of log(Te) = 5.7 − 7.0 K and corroborate previous TRACE and AIA results on their near-isothermality and the validity of the Rosner-Tucker-Vaiana (RTV) law at soft X-ray temperatures (T ∼ 2 MK) and its failure at lower EUV temperatures.