Statistical Analysis and Catalog of Non-polar Coronal Holes Covering the SDO-era using CATCH

Coronal holes are usually defined as dark structures as seen in the extreme ultraviolet and X-ray spectrum which are generally associated with open magnetic field. Deriving reliably the coronal hole boundary is of high interest, as its area, underlying magnetic field, and other properties give important hints towards high speed solar wind acceleration processes and on compression regions arriving at Earth. In this study we present a new threshold based extraction method that incorporates the intensity gradient along the coronal hole boundary, which is implemented as a user-friendly SSWIDL GUI. The Collection of Analysis Tools for Coronal Holes (CATCH) enables the user to download data, perform guided coronal hole extraction and analyze the underlying photospheric magnetic field. We use CATCH to analyze non-polar coronal holes during the SDO-era, based on 193 {\AA} filtergrams taken by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) and magnetograms taken by the Heliospheric and Magnetic Imager (HMI), both on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Between 2010 and 2019 we investigate 707 coronal holes that are located close to the central meridian. We find coronal holes distributed across latitudes of about +/- 60 degree for which we derive sizes between 1.6 x 10 9 and 1.8 x 10 11 km^2 . The absolute value of the mean signed magnetic field strength tends towards an average of 2.9 +/- 1.9 G. As far as the abundance and size of coronal holes is concerned, we find no distinct trend towards the northern or southern hemisphere. We find that variations in local and global conditions may significantly change the threshold needed for reliable coronal hole extraction and thus, we can highlight the importance of individually assessing and extracting coronal holes.
Comment: 30 pages, 14 figures; accepted for publication in Solar Physics October 04, 2019