Inference of Chromospheric Plasma Parameters on the Sun from Strong Absorption Lines

The solar chromosphere can be observed well through strong absorption lines. We infer the physical parameters of chromospheric plasmas from these lines using a multilayer spectral inversion. This is a new technique of spectral inversion. We assume that the atmosphere consists of a finite number of layers. In each layer the absorption profile is constant and the source function is allowed to vary with optical depth. Specifically, we consider a three-layer model of radiative transfer where the lowest layer is identified with the photosphere and the two upper layers are identified with the chromosphere. This three-layer model is fully specified by 13 parameters. Four parameters can be fixed to prescribed values, and one parameter can be determined from the analysis of a satellite photospheric line. The remaining eight parameters are determined from a constrained least-squares fitting. We applied the multilayer spectral inversion to the spectral data of the Hα and the Ca II 854.21 nm lines taken in a quiet region by the Fast Imaging Solar Spectrograph (FISS) of the Goode Solar Telescope (GST). We find that our model successfully fits most of the observed profiles and produces regular maps of the model parameters. We conclude that our multilayer inversion is useful to infer chromospheric plasma parameters on the Sun.