Data-Driven MHD Model of Global Solar Corona and Inner Heliosphere with Nearly Incompressible MHD Turbulence Coronal Heating

How is the solar corona heated? Physical models that address the question of heating of the solar corona fall into essentially two classes: wave/turbulence-driven models and reconnection/loop-opening models. The transport of waves and turbulence beyond the photosphere is central to the coronal heating problem. Zank et al., 2018 proposed a new model describing the transport and evolution of turbulence in the quiet solar corona and applied it to a simple 1D model of the corona. This model utilizes the nearly incompressible magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equations to describe the transport of low-frequency turbulence in open magnetic field regions. The model describes the evolution of the coupled majority quasi-2D and minority slab component, driven by the magnetic carpet and advected by a subsonic, sub-Alfvénic flow from the lower corona.

In this work, we couple the nearly incompressible MHD turbulence model of Zank et al., 2018 with the data-driven MHD model of global solar corona (Yalim et al., 2017) that can be driven by a variety of solar observational data including synoptic/synchronic vector and line-of-sight magnetograms through a set of characteristically-consistent boundary conditions at the inner boundary. This provides us with a both mathematically and physically consistent, realistic tool to simulate the background solar wind.

We will present an overview of our coupled model and present results of a benchmark case of relaxing a dipole magnetic field and a three-dimensional global simulation of solar wind propagation to the Earth orbit and comparison with satellite data at 1 AU.