Authors: Cooper Downs (PSI)

Modern studies of coronal heating often involve conducting magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) or field-aligned hydrodynamic (HD) simulations of realistic magnetic field configurations in 3D.  Incorporating a realistic surface flux-distribution into the modeling generally implies complex connectivities and a wide-range of loop properties in the volume-filling 3D coronal field (length, field strength, areal expansion).  Given the wealth of information present in a time-evolving 3D model, it can be useful to seek ways to capture the essence of the magnetic field and plasma state in a reduced dimensional form. In this presentation, we overview several ways in which field-line mappings and associated field-aligned integrals can accomplish this goal. Using a high-resolution field-aligned HD simulation of an active region and a data-driven MHD model of the global corona as examples, we illustrate how such mappings can be used to characterize: (1) the basic connectivity and topology of a region; (2) average loop properties and statistics, which can be related to coronal heating scaling laws; and (3) the time-evolving nature of loop heating and cooling cycles.  Although many of the mapping techniques are not fundamentally new, our goal is to collect these ideas in one place, discuss the finer points of how different weightings conserve (or not) certain properties, and demonstrate how they can be a useful tool in our toolbox for characterizing modern coronal heating simulations. These methods in will also be available in upcoming releases of our open-source field-line tracing codes for spherical geometries in Fortran (MapFL) and python (mapflpy), available on GitHub.