Speaker
Description
Unaccounted solar storms travelling towards Earth can disrupt orbiting satellites and ground-based infrastructure. These threats motivate the development of computational models of plasma activity from the Sun to Earth; such models often rely on empirical coronal inputs to predict events well in advance and mitigate their impact. In this work, we use COCONUT (COolfluid COronal uNstrUcTured), developed to model the solar corona using a time-implicit finite-volume (FV) solver that outperforms its time-explicit counterparts. We extend the model to include the lower layers of the atmosphere, namely the chromosphere and the transition region, to capture ion–neutral interactions for more accurate predictions.
To this end, we implement the multi-fluid formulation of the MHD governing equations in COCONUT, treating ions and neutral atoms as separate fluids. This formalism is necessary because the lower temperatures in the lower layers lead to partial ionisation and significant neutral populations. We present the numerical implementation and discuss the expected improvements in modelling the chromosphere and its coupling to the corona.
