Reconstructing the 3D coronal magnetic field using a Potential Field Source Surface model comparing different magnetograph input data

Abstract:

We utilize a Potential Field Source Sourface (PFSS) model developed by Altschuler & Newkirk (1969) to model and analyze the coronal magnetic field up to the source surface at 2.5 solar radii. As the photospheric boundary to that model we employ data from several instruments, namely the Wilcox Solar Observatory, NSO's Kitt Peak Vacuum Telescope, the Michelson Doppler Imager onboard the SOHO spacecraft and its successor, the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager onboard SDO. Instead of the harmonic function approach commonly used, we employ a three dimensional computational grid and methods of computational fluid dynamics to solve the governing equations in order to easily incorporate more complex phenomena if the need for doing so arises during the course of our work. Another advantage of the grid approach is the possibility to outsource the computational work to a parallel computing architecture like NVIDIA's CUDA, which we employ to speed up processing time and increase data throughput significantly. The obtained magnetic field data is utilized in several ways. First it is compared with in-situ data from several spacecraft like Ulysses to validate the employed PFSS model. We further use the expansion geometry of the magnetic field as an input to a 1D-solar-wind model developed by Cranmer et al. (2007) to determine characteristics of the solar wind in several magnetic flux tubes. We can then infer the theoretical charge-state composition inside these flux tubes, which in turn can be employed to test our hypotheses on the origin of the slow solar wind.