Limitations and biases in the retrieval of the polar magnetic field. I. The role of the magnetic filling factor in Milne-Eddington inversions of simulated hinode/SP data

We study the extent to which Milne-Eddington inversions are able to retrieve and characterize the magnetic landscape of the solar poles from observations by the spectropolarimeter on board Hinode. In particular, we evaluate whether a variable magnetic filling factor is an adequate modeling technique for retrieving the intrinsic magnetic properties from every pixel in the polar field of view. We first generate synthetic spectra emerging from a numerical simulation of a "plage" region at an inclined line of sight of 65 DEG;, and degrade the data to emulate real observations. Then, we invert the synthetic spectra with two Milne-Eddington inversion codes that feature different treatments of the magnetic filling factor, and relate the retrieved magnetic quantities back to their original values in the simulation cube. We find that, while the apparent retrieved magnetic properties map the spatially degraded simulation well, the intrinsic magnetic quantities bear little relation to the magnetic field at the native resolution of the simulation. We discuss the systematic biases caused by line-of-sight foreshortening, spatial degradation, photon noise, and modeling assumptions embedded in the inversion algorithm.