CORONAL DYNAMICS AND THE AIA ON SDO L. GOLUB Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge MA, 02138, USA (E-mail: lgolub@cfa.harvard.edu) (Received 25 July 2005; Accepted in final form 14 February 2006) Abstract. We provide a brief overview of present-day studies of inner corona dynamics, with ex- amples of mass ejections (CME), flares and active region dynamics. While the names of the topics have not changed in several decades, the internal details and the language used to express the nature of the problem have changed considerably. We conclude with a short discussion of the contribution to studies of coronal dynamics to be expected from the Atmospheric Imager Assembly (AIA) on the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Keywords: solar corona, coronal activity, solar dynamics, SDO 1. Introduction Studies of coronal dynamics have been greatly advanced in recent years by observa- tions from space. Satellites such as SoHO (1995) and TRACE (1998) are providing new views of the inner corona with unprecedented spectral and spatial coverage. Yet observation of the solar atmosphere continues to be complicated by at least four factors: 1. The temperature range is <10 4 to >10 7 K, with a comparable spread in the wavelength of the emitted radiation (viz. Figure 1a), effectively preventing a single instrument from observing a complete atmospheric structure. 2. Because of the high temperature (and perhaps also the energy deposition proc- esses) the atmosphere is greatly extended, requiring a large field of view. 3. Because of the magnetic field, the atmosphere is in a highly dynamic state, with fine structure transverse to the field (viz. Figure 1b). Combined with the large field of view, this means that the instrument used must have a very large number of pixels, which places an enormous burden on the resources of the spacecraft. 4. The atmosphere is, to a great extent, optically thin so that many structures add up along any line of sight. It is therefore usually quite difficult to isolate the feature under study and separate it from other structures in the atmosphere. Further progress is thus hampered by the lack of spectral coverage, combined with limitations on field of view and temporal resolution, the latter due to limitations on data storage and data downlink rates. In this paper we provide a sampling of Space Science Reviews (2006) 124: 23–33 DOI: 10.1007/s11214-006-9097-7 C  Springer 2007