Modeling Statistical Properties of Solar Active Regions through DNS of 3D-MHD Turbulence

TL;DR

This paper uses DNS of 3D-MHD turbulence to model and compare the statistical properties of solar active regions, revealing their turbulent nature and the transition from forced to decaying turbulence during flares.

Contribution

It demonstrates that DNS of 3D-MHD turbulence can replicate observed statistical properties of solar active regions and links flare phases to turbulence states.

Findings

DNS replicates AR statistical properties

Intermittency trends match observations

Flaring stages correspond to different turbulence regimes

Abstract

Statistical properties of the Sun's photospheric turbulent magnetic field, especially those of the Active Regions (ARs), have been studied using the line-of-sight data from magnetograms taken by SOHO and several other instruments (see e.g. Abramenko et al (2002, 2003),Abramenko and Yurchyshyn (2010)). This includes structure functions and their exponents, flatness curves and correlation functions. In these works, the dependence of structure function exponents ($\zeta_p$) of the order of the structure functions ($\it{p}$) was modeled using a non-intermittent K41 model. It is now well known that the ARs are highly turbulent and are associated with strong intermittent events. In this paper we compare some of the observations from Abramenko et al (2003) with the log-Poisson model (Biskamp 2003) used for modeling intermittent MHD turbulent flows. Next, we analyze the structure function data obtained from the direct numerical simulations (DNS) of homogeneous, incompressible 3D-MHD turbulence in three cases: sustained by forcing, freely decaying and a flow initially driven and later allowed to decay (case 3). The respective DNS replicate the properties seen in the plots of $\zeta_p$ against $\it{p}$ of ARs. We also reproduce the trends and changes observed in intermittency in flatness [Abramenko and Yurchyshyn (2010)] and correlation functions [Abramenko et al (2003)] of ARs. It is suggested from this analysis that an AR in the onset phase of a flare can be treated as a forced 3D-MHD turbulent system in its simplest form and that the flaring stage is representative of decaying 3D-MHD turbulence. It is also inferred that significant changes in intermittency from the initial onset phase of a flare to its final peak flaring phase, are related to the time taken by the system to reach the initial onset phase.