Bifrost spectral inversions, Fast non-LTE solar chromospheric diagnostics from 3D simulations

Abstract

Modern solar observatories produce vast amounts of detailed spectral data. To infer atmospheric parameters from these data, in particular for the solar chromosphere, requires immense computational resources. This problem is becoming more acute as spatial resolution improves, and faster methods are much needed to make sense of the data. Archive-based inversions provide a cost-effective way to infer atmospheric parameters from solar spectra, and involve building databases of synthetic spectra and atmospheric models. We extend this idea to a $k$-nearest neighbour inversion with non-LTE chromospheric spectra from a three-dimensional radiative-magnetohydrodynamic simulation. Our database consists of 150 million \theline\ line profiles from a magnetically quiet simulation. We validate our method on a different simulation, and then apply the database inversion on high-cadence observations taken with the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope and find excellent agreement between the observed and fitted spectra for almost the entire field of view. We recover the chromospheric temperature and line-of-sight velocity, and calculate the uncertainty in their inversions. The gas temperature has small uncertainties over a broad range of optical depths, and we recover a physically consistent solution over a broad range of optical depths, even beyond the line sensitivity region. Compared with the traditional inversion method, our approach is four orders of magnitude faster. Limitations and future improvements of the method are discussed.