The Principal Investigator (PI) and her collaborator will evaluate the success of several models now being hosted at the Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, to determine how these models can best be used and how they could be improved. This effort will specifically focus on the Wang-Sheeley-Arge (WSA) coronal model, the Magnetohydrodynamics-Around-A-Sphere (MAS) coronal model, the ENLIL heliospheric/solar wind model ("Enlil" was the Sumerian wind god), and the Space Weather Modeling Framework (SWMF), in order to systemically evaluate their capabilities in simulating the solar corona and solar wind structure for the solar minimum period of 2007-09. To compare model output with multi-spacecraft observations, the PI's team will test about 246 model runs for each solar Carrington rotation and for each available spacecraft as an observation source, in order to fully assess the differences in model output caused by the varying solar boundary conditions measured by different spacecraft, as opposed to variations caused by different physics or numerical treatments in the various models. Because these team members are not involved in developing specific models, they can provide an unbiased evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of each model and in this way, assist the original developers with model validation and enhancement.
This effort will advance the community's ability to use the models at the CCMC to accurately simulate solar wind evolution in the inner heliosphere and to connect phenomena occurring on the Sun with solar wind structures. This evaluation of the CCMC's solar corona and solar wind models is a necessary step in validating the tools needed for further advances in space physics research and in space weather forecasting. The PI is a young female postdoc who will receive mentoring and career development through this project, thereby enhancing the participation of underrepresented groups in the physical sciences. The Co-PI also will incorporate these results into his courses teaching undergraduate and graduate students. The team will disseminate these research results broadly through participation at annual scientific meetings and workshops.
