Time-evolving coronal modelling of the solar maximum around the solar storms in May 2024 by COCONUT

TL;DR

This paper enhances the COCONUT MHD coronal model to improve numerical stability and resolution during solar maximum, enabling more accurate real-time simulations of complex solar magnetic structures around solar storms.

Contribution

The study improves the COCONUT model's stability and resolution for solar maximum conditions, demonstrating its effectiveness in real-time global coronal simulations during active solar periods.

Findings

Enhanced positivity-preserving property improves stability.

Higher spatial resolution yields stronger magnetic field simulations.

Time-evolving models better match observational data.

Abstract

Time-evolving MHD coronal models deliver more realistic results than traditional quasi-steady-state models. The fully implicit time-evolving coronal model COCONUT performs efficiently enough for real-time coronal simulations during solar minimum. However, during solar maxima, the coronal magnetic field is more complex and stronger, and coronal structures evolve more rapidly than during solar minima. Time-evolving MHD coronal modelling of solar maxima often struggles with poor numerical stability and low computational efficiency. We enhanced the numerical stability of the time-evolving coronal model COCONUT to mitigate these issues with the aim to evaluate the differences between the time-evolving and quasi-steady-state coronal simulation results, and to assess the impact of the spatial resolution on global MHD coronal modelling of solar maxima. After enhancing the positivity-preserving property of COCONUT, we employed it to simulate the evolution of coronal structures within 0.1 AU in an inertial coordinate system over two CRs around the solar storms in May 2024. These simulations were performed on unstructured geodesic meshes containing 6.06, 1.52, and 0.38 M cells. We also conducted a quasi-steady-state coronal simulation that treated the solar surface as a rigidly rotating spherical shell. A comparison with observations further validated the reliability of the time-evolving coronal modelling technique. It shows that incorporating the evolution of the magnetic field on the solar surface can significantly improve the fidelity of global MHD coronal simulations around a solar maximum. A simulated magnetic field strength using a mesh with 6.06 M cells can be stronger by more than 40% than that in a mesh with 0.38 M cells. The fully implicit time-evolving model COCONUT shows promise for accurately conducting real-time global coronal simulations of solar maxima.