Magnetic Maps and Coronal/Solar Wind Modeling: Practices and Pitfalls (Invited)

The ambient solar corona and solar wind play a crucial role in solar and heliospheric physics. The Sun's magnetic field is an essential ingredient of any predictive model of the solar wind. It defines the structure of the heliosphere, including the position of the heliospheric current sheet and the regions of fast and slow solar wind. The geoeffectiveness of CMEs is influenced in part by their interaction with the ambient magnetic field, and the field determines where SEPs propagate. To model the global magnetic field of the solar corona, maps of the magnetic field over the entire solar surface must be supplied as boundary conditions. In this talk, we demonstrate how common errors and uncertainties in the field measurements can at times strongly influence the solutions, and we discuss some of the key challenges to improving magnetic maps. Research supported by CISM (NSF), the LWS Strategic Capabilities Program (NASA, NSF, and AFOSR), and Heliophysics Theory Program (NASA).