Validation of a Wave Heated 3D MHD Coronal-wind Model using Polarized Brightness and EUV Observations

Abstract

The physical properties responsible for the formation and evolution of the corona and heliosphere are still not completely understood. 3D MHD global modeling is a powerful tool to investigate all the possible candidate processes. To fully understand the role of each of them, we need a validation process where the output from the simulations is quantitatively compared to the observational data. In this work, we present the results from our validation process applied to the wave turbulence driven 3D MHD corona-wind model WindPredict-AW. At this stage of the model development, we focus the work to the coronal regime in quiescent condition. We analyze three simulation results, which differ by the boundary values. We use the 3D distributions of density and temperature, output from the simulations at the time of around the first Parker Solar Probe perihelion (during minimum of the solar activity), to synthesize both extreme ultraviolet (EUV) and white-light-polarized (WL pB) images to reproduce the observed solar corona. For these tests, we selected AIA 193 Å, 211 Å, and 171 Å EUV emissions, MLSO K-Cor, and LASCO C2 pB images obtained on 2018 November 6 and 7. We then make quantitative comparisons of the disk and off limb corona. We show that our model is able to produce synthetic images comparable to those of the observed corona.

COCONUT, a Novel Fast-converging MHD Model for Solar Corona Simulations: I. Benchmarking and Optimization of Polytropic Solutions

“…1D wind models have also proved to be interesting for their capacity of including realistic physics at reasonable computational costs (Lionello et al 2001;Suzuki & Inutsuka 2005;Grappin et al 2010), and can be used to map the entire sphere to simulate the lower corona as in the MULTI-VP model (Pinto & Rouillard 2017). Other 3D MHD models have been developed and improved over the years with systematic comparisons to both in situ and remote-sensing data for validation; such as AWSoM (van der Holst et al 2010(van der Holst et al , 2014Sachdeva et al 2019); the model from , Usmanov et al (2016, Usmanov et al (2018), Chhiber et al (2021); or Wind-Predict (Réville et al 2015a;Perri et al 2018;Réville et al 2020;Parenti et al 2022). Yet other models have focused on BCs to provide the most physical conditions for time-dependent models (Wu et al 2006), such as in Yalim et al (2017), Singh et al (2018).…”

Evolution of Alfvén Waves in the Solar Wind. Monochromatic Driver

“…The very low atmospheric layers of the corona are important but still difficult to model in two and three dimensions as they involve very steep gradients of density and temperature over only a few thousand kilometers and consequently, much higher spatial resolution would be required. The inner radial boundary is therefore placed in the upper transition region at a fixed temperature of 5 × 10 5 K. A similar approach has been adopted in 3D simulations of Alfvén wave turbulence (Parenti et al 2022).…”

“…Turbulence cannot be sustained in a homogeneous medium with no reflection. Alfvén-wave turbulence could operate when there are counter-propagating Alfvén waves in an inhomogeneous medium where they reflect partially (Goldreich & Sridhar 1995;Cranmer & Van Ballegooijen 2005;Parenti et al 2022;Velli 1993). Counter-propagating Alfvén waves in the corona can couple nonlinearly and produce turbulence that dissipates and heats up the corona (Kraichnan 1999;Dobrowolny et al 1980;Ghosh et al 1988;Dmitruk et al 2001).…”

“…Note that the heating rate is uniform in latitude and azimuth. It only depends on radial distance r. A similar heating term can be used in 3D modeling (Parenti et al 2022).…”

COCONUT, a novel fast-converging MHD model for solar corona simulations: I. Benchmarking and optimization of polytropic solutions

“…1-D wind models have also proved to be interesting for their capacity of including realistic physics at reasonable computational costs (Lionello et al 2001;Suzuki & Inutsuka 2005;Grappin et al 2010), and can be used to map the entire sphere to simulate the lower corona as in the MULTI-VP model (Pinto & Rouillard 2017). Other 3-D MHD models have been developed and improved over the years with systematic comparisons to both in-situ and remote-sensing data for validation, such as AWSoM (van der Holst et al 2010;van der Holst et al 2014;Sachdeva et al 2019), the model from Usmanov et al (2014Usmanov et al ( , 2016Usmanov et al ( , 2018; Chhiber et al (2021) or Wind-Predict (Réville et al 2015a;Perri et al 2018;Réville et al 2020;Parenti et al 2022). Yet other models have focused on boundary conditions to provide the most physical conditions for time-dependent models (Wu et al 2006), such as in Yalim et al (2017); Singh et al (2018).…”