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Sergio Ortolani did his thesis on the dynamics of fast z-pinches at the ENEA Fusion Laboratory in Frascati (Rome), receiving his doctorate in Physics from the University of Rome in 1970. In 1971, he joined the Istituto Gas lonizzati of the Italian National Council of Research (CNR) in Padova where he began studying plasma magnetic confinement in Reversed Field Pinch configurations as part of the European Fusion Programme. In 1975 he worked at the CTR division of Los Alamos National Laboratory on toroidal pinch experiments. For the last 20 years he has been engaged in experimental and theoretical research on MHD fluctuations and on plasma radiation and transport phenomena, working in close collaboration with many research institutions in Europe, USA, Japan, and USSR. He is currently involved in the study of relaxation phenomena and of heating and transport processes in laboratory and in naturally occurring plasmas. Dr. Ortolani is presently CNR Director of Research at the Istituto Gas lonizzati (EURATOM-ENEA-CNR Association, Padova) where he heads the scientific programme of the newly-constructed European experiment, RFX.

A three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic model of the global solar corona is described. The model uses observed photospheric magnetic fields as a boundary condition. A version of the model with a polytropic energy equation is used to interpret solar observations, including eclipse images of the corona, Ulysses spacecraft measurements of the interplanetary magnetic field, and coronal hole boundaries from Kitt Peak He 10 830 Å maps and extreme ultraviolet images from the Solar Heliospheric Observatory. Observed magnetic fields are used as a boundary condition to model the evolution of the solar corona during the period February 1997-March 1998. A model with an improved energy equation and Alfvén waves that is better able to model the solar wind is also presented.

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