Abstract Nonlinear force-free magnetic field (NLFFF) extrapolation based on the observed photospheric magnetic field is the most important method to obtain the coronal magnetic field nowadays. However, raw photospheric magnetograms contain magnetic forces and small-scale noises, and fail to be consistent with the force-free assumption of NLFFF models. The procedure for removing the forces and noises in observed data is called preprocessing. In this paper, we extend the preprocessing code of Jiang & Feng to spherical coordinates for a full sphere. We first smooth the observed data with Gaussian smoothing, and then split the smoothed magnetic field into a potential field and a non-potential field. The potential part is computed by a numerical potential field model, and the non-potential part is preprocessed using an optimization method to minimize the magnetic forces and magnetic torques. Applying the code to synoptic charts of the vector magnetic field from SDO/HMI, we find it can effectively reduce the noises and forces, and improve the quality of data for a better input which will be used for NLFFF extrapolations applied to the global corona.
Keywords magnetic fields — magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) — methods: numerical — Sun: corona
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