The operationally ready full three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic (3D MHD) model from the Sun to Earth: COCONUT+Icarus

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel full 3D MHD model chain from the Sun to Earth, integrating coronal and heliospheric models to improve space weather forecasting accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces the implementation of a full MHD coronal model into the COCONUT framework and couples it with the Icarus heliospheric model, advancing realistic solar wind simulations.

Findings

The full MHD model captures a more realistic bi-modal solar wind.

The coronal model's approximated heating functions reasonably simulate the wind.

The combined model runs efficiently, only 1.8 times longer than previous polytropic models.

Abstract

Solar wind modelling has become a crucial area of study due to the increased dependence of modern society on technology, navigation, and power systems. Accurate space weather forecasts can predict upcoming threats to Earth's geospace. In this study, we examine a novel full magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) chain from the Sun to Earth. The goal of this study is to demonstrate the capabilities of the full MHD modelling chain from the Sun to Earth by finalising the implementation of the full MHD coronal model into the COolfluid COroNa UnsTructured (COCONUT) model and coupling it to the MHD heliospheric model Icarus. The resulting coronal model has significant advantages compared to the pre-existing polytropic alternative, as it models a more realistic bi-modal wind, which is crucial for heliospheric studies. In this study, only thermal conduction, radiative losses, and approximated coronal heating function were considered in the energy equation. A realistic specific heat ratio was applied. The output of the coronal model was used to onset the 3D MHD heliospheric model Icarus. A minimum solar activity case was chosen as the first test case for the full MHD model. The numerically simulated data in the corona and the heliosphere were compared to observational products. We present a first attempt to obtain the full MHD chain from the Sun to Earth with COCONUT and Icarus. The coronal model has been upgraded to a full MHD model for a realistic bi-modal solar wind configuration. The approximated heating functions have modelled the wind reasonably well, but simple approximations are not enough to obtain a realistic density-speed balance or realistic features in the low corona and farther, near the outer boundary. The full MHD model was computed in 1.06 h on 180 cores of the Genius cluster of the Vlaams Supercomputing Center, which is only 1.8 times longer than the polytropic simulation.