SH14A-08
How Reliable Is the Solar Wind Prediction from the Models Installed at the CCMC?
Monday, 14 December 2015: 17:45
2011 (Moscone West)
Lan Jian1,2, Peter J MacNeice2, Aleksandre Taktakishvili2,3, Dusan Odstrcil2,4, Bernard V Jackson5, Hsiu-Shan Yu5, Pete Riley6 and Igor Sokolov7, (1)University of Maryland College Park, College Park, MD, United States, (2)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (3)Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, United States, (4)George Mason University Fairfax, School of Physics, Astronomy, and Computational Sciences, Fairfax, VA, United States, (5)University of California San Diego, Center for Astrophysics and Space Science, La Jolla, CA, United States, (6)Predictive Science Inc., San Diego, CA, United States, (7)University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States
Abstract:
The prediction of solar wind background is a necessary part of space weather forecasting. Multiple coronal and heliospheric models have been installed and/or recently upgraded at the Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) to produce the solar wind. They include the Wang-Sheely-Arge (WSA)-Enlil model, MHD-Around-a-Sphere (MAS)-Enlil model, Space Weather Modeling Framework (SWMF), and heliospheric tomography using the interplanetary scintillation (IPS) data. By comparing the modeling results with the OMNI and Ulysses data over seven Carrington rotations in 2007, we have conducted a third-party validation of these models for the near-Earth solar wind and the solar wind at mid-to-high latitudes, respectively. We have developed comprehensive performance metrics for solar wind simulation, which can be adapted to future model validation. The performance metrics include visual comparison, assessment of the time series and statistics of solar wind parameters, evaluation focused on the magnetic field sector boundaries (SBs) and slow-to-fast stream interaction regions (SIRs). General strengths and weaknesses for each model are diagnosed to provide an unbiased reference to model developers and users. For this period, the 2014 version of MAS-Enlil model works best for SBs; the heliospheric tomography works best for SIRs; while the 2012 version of SWMF model works best for fast wind at mid-to-high latitudes. This work will help these models get ready for the transition from research to operation.
