Observation and Modeling of Polar Plumes Observed during the March 29, 2006 Total Solar Eclipse

Polar plumes, plasma structures along open magnetic field lines in solar coronal holes, have long been thought to contribute to the solar wind. The aim of this work is to determine if solar eclipse and space‐based line intensity observations of plumes may be used to determine if deviations from hydrostatic equilibrium can be observed in plumes. We have obtained observations of the March 29, 2006 total solar eclipse from Cape Coast, Ghana and simultaneous coronal filtergrams from the Extreme‐ultraviolet Imaging Telescope aboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. We have developed a one‐dimensional hydrodynamic computational plume model to test against the observations. We performed a parameter study in which the plumes' basal temperatures (20,000 K) and thermal conductive flux were fixed while other parameters of the model including the base velocity (from 105–104 cm⋅s−1), base pressure (from 1014–1015 K⋅cm−3), scale height (from 0.05–1.00 Rs) and heating rate(from 10−1–10−5 ergs⋅cm−2⋅s−1) were varied...