Information about the magnetic topology of the solar corona is crucial to the understanding of solar energetic events. One approach to characterizing the topology that has had some success is magnetic charge topology, in which the topology is defined by partitioning the observed photospheric field into a set of discrete sources and determining which pairs are interlinked by coronal field lines. The level of topological activity is then quantified through the transfer of flux between regions of differing field line connectivity. We discuss in detail how to implement such a model for a time series of vector magnetograms, paying particular attention to distinguishing real evolution of the photospheric magnetic flux from changes due to variations in atmospheric seeing, as well as uncorrelated noise. We determine the reliability of our method and estimate the uncertainties in its results. We then demonstrate it through an application to NOAA active region 8210, which has been the subject of extensive previous study.
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