Cole Tamburri

Current projects

High-resolution analysis of coronal flare loops

On 8 August 2024, the sun released a massive GOES-class X1.3 solar flare. During our cycle 2 DKIST flare campaign, we observed the decay phase of this flare under excellent seeing conditions, revealing Hα images of highly structured flare ribbons, a top-down view of coronal rain, and the smallest post-reconnection flare loops ever observed — by any telescope.

Read the study (Tamburri et al. 2025) here…

… and a press release associated with this work here.

Detailed modeling of chromospheric flare spectra

The most exciting component of my graduate studies has been the collection of high-resolution spectroscopic and spectropolarimetric observations with the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope. Over the course of two flare campaigns for which I was the PI, we have observed four flares, including impulsive phase observations of a flare captured by DKIST (11 August 2024).

Recently, I have been studying the remarkable small-scale spectral variability in the chromospheric Ca II H, Hβ, and Hϵ spectral lines during this flare. To explain this variability using modern flare codes, we need to employ a range of heating scenarios — including both the heating mechanism and the parameters describing that mechanism.

For a different flare, we recently published the first investigation of Ca II H and Hϵ flare spectra observed by DKIST in comparison to RADYN and RH synthetic flare atmospheres.

Read the first paper in the series (Tamburri et al. 2026) here

The Impulsiveness of Solar Flares

For my Masters’ project, I developed a new classification mechanism for flares that captures the “impulsiveness” (or suddenness) of energy release emission. In stellar flare spectra, this feature has been found to be related to key spectral properties of flares and could be indicative of important fundamental flare processes. We found that the Impulsiveness Index may be related to the rates of flare-time particle precipitation. This could inform our understanding of both solar and stellar flares using only the information included in Sun-as-a-star light curves.

Read the paper (Tamburri et al. 2024) here.