Using MHD Models for Context for Multispacecraft Missions

The use of global MHD models such as BATS-R-US to provide context to data from widely spaced multispacecraft mission platforms is gaining in popularity and in effectiveness. Examples are shown, primarily from the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS) program compared to BATS-R-US. We present several examples of large-scale magnetospheric configuration changes such as tail dipolarization events and reconfigurations after a sector boundary crossing which are made much more easily understood by placing the spacecraft in the model fields. In general, the models can reproduce the large-scale changes observed by the various spacecraft but sometimes miss small-scale or rapid time changes.