A bit more explanation

H, Ca-II K Imaging: There is one `spare' optical bench at MWO that can be accommodated fairly easily in the data acquisition chain. It would be nice to have some information from higher in the solar atmosphere than the Na (middle photosphere) and K (lower photosphere) MOF data. Additionally a magnetically active line would be nice for tracing activity not immediately obvious from the other images, this would be especially useful for choosing `quiet regions' for local analysis.

 

Magnetograms: Until recently the MOFs used to take magnetograms as well as Dopplergrams. Unfortunately the present observing system lacks both the software to drive the additional l/4 plate (easy to fix), and has too much overhead to record images at the required cadence (see: Modify DAQ software. The addition of magnetograms would provide yet another input to the local analysis. There is also a problem with absolute calibration of magnetograms, at the moment i just compare them to the 150'  Na and NSO magnetograms, but a study of calibration techniques would be interesting.

 

High resolution imaging: Using fairly simple adaptive optics (tip-tilt) it is possible to correct major atmospheric motions. It would be interesting to see how well we could track fairly small regions with high resolution as input to Local Helioseismology.

 

New computing techniques: New computing techniques may provide better solutions to some of the problems in HS, especially in the areas of peak-fitting and minimization.

 

Other fields: There is already a good rapport between terrestrial seismology and helioseismology, which has been profitable to both sides. We also share similarities with the techniques used in ocean seismo-acoustics (trapped acoustic waves) and Medical imaging. It would be interesting to see where the lines of commonality lie, and what we can learn and teach those fields. For instance most medical imaging relies on reconstruction of internal structure from measurements of absorption through a straight line, local seismology tries to do a very similar thing, only the absorption path is curved.

 

Modify DAQ software: There are several improvements that can be made to the Data Acquisition Software. Presently the images are saved in a non-standard format, and the code used to write to tape is also non-standard, very slow, and proving difficult to port to other platforms (it seem to have a big problem with any UNIX sys V at the moment). It seems that a good approach would be to change the images to the standard FITS format, and save them to tape with TAR. It would also be very nice to have the system overhead low enough that 4 images can be acquired every 60s and so we can record high resolution magnetograms and Dopplergrams. It would also be nice if the Dopplergrams (at least) could be calculated on-the-fly, and so reduce one step in the reduction pipeline.

 

Pipeline reductions: At the moment we can not keep up with the data rate from observations. A large amount of interaction is also needed in the reduction at the moment, which also slows things down. A non-interactive, pipelined reduction will be needed to keep up with the data rate, and perhaps we can learn a lot from the GONG and MDI projects here.

 

Image restoration: Image restoration should allow us to see to higher l, and also improve the spectra. Almost as a by-produce we get the instantaneous MTF, which is one of the criteria used to combine data from various sites by the GONG group. We will need to do this sort of thing soon.

 

Local phase shifts: The phase shifts between velocity and intensity oscillations tell us about the adiabaticity of the atmosphere sampled by the mode. As far as i know this has only been done for low-degree global measurements. It might be interesting to do this on a `local' scale with data from MDI, MWO and TON.

 

LHS models: Currently LHS is based on a `seems like it should work' model, with no firm theoretical basis. A model that can provide a p-mode spectrum with known input parameters would be very useful to test various analysis techniques to see if we can recover the parameters, and with what errors.

 

Formation heights: By looking at different wavelengths we can probe various heights in the solar atmosphere. The actual formation height if the observation point will be important in the interpretation of the results from these experiments, and the localization of the source of the p-mode oscillations.