MHD simulations: Corotating Interaction Regions

Corotating Interaction Regions (CIRs) form in the solar wind when parcels of fast-speed wind interact with slow-speed wind due to the rotation of the Sun. The resulting buildup of pressure generates disturbances that, with increasing time (or distance from the Sun), may develop into a so-called forward-reverse shock-pair. During solar-quiet times CIRs can be the dominant force shaping large-scale structures in the heliosphere. Studying CIRs is therefore important because the associated shocks are capable of e.g. accelerating energetic particles or deflecting cosmic rays. The global structure of CIRs can be modeled with an MHD approach that gives the plasma quantities needed to model the transport of particles in the heliosphere (with e.g. stochastic differential equations (SDEs)). Our MHD code CRONOS employs a semi-discrete finite volume scheme with adaptive time-stepping Runge-Kutta integration. The solenoidality of the magnetic field is ensured via constrained transport and the code supports Cartesian, Cylindrical and Spherical coordinates (including coordinate singularities) with the option for non-equidistant grids. The code runs in parallel (MPI) and supports the HDF5 output data format. Here, we show results from 3D-MHD simulations with our code CRONOS for a) analytic boundary conditions where results can be compared to those obtained with a different code and b) boundary conditions derived with the Wang-Sheeley-Arge model from observational data (WSO), which are compared to spacecraft observations. Comparison with Pizzo (1982) for analytic boundary conditions

Comparison with STEREO A for Carrington Rotation 2060