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Imaging instruments are required to capture flares and study the transport of mass, momentum
and energy through the solar atmosphere. Of NASA's fleet of spacecraft, SDO provides full Sun
magnetic and thermal data every few seconds at 1" resolution. The SDO/AIA UV (160nm) and
EUV channels observe material above and at the base of the chromosphere, omitting several
scale heights between the chromosphere and corona. From 2012, the UV slit spectrometer
IRIS will partly plug this gap by making rapid rasters of chromospheric features. We propose
to augment these capabilities using, in particular, the IBIS imaging spectropolarimeter at
Sacramento Peak Observatory, and applying sophisticated spectral line inversion techniques to
full Stokes photospheric and chromospheric data. Our goal is to investigate the 3D magnetic
field configurations in the solar atmosphere necessary for flares to occur and their changes
during and after flares.
Our proposed work is essential to this focused science topic, because our complementary
observations have the proven capability to (1) capture flares efficiently; (2) measure both
thermal and vector magnetic properties of photospheric and chromospheric plasma through the
Zeeman effect, (3) study the role of particle beams through their imprint on linear polarization of
chromospheric lines. The simultaneous use of space- and ground-based instruments will reveal
crucial aspects of the physics of flare phenomena, unattainable otherwise, at a time when the
solar activity is increasing. Our work will also help define the next generation of space-based
instruments, such as will fly on SOLAR-C.
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Current Version: 3.1 (04/16/2014) 
