Speaker
Description
Modeling of the corona and solar wind is challenging, as it is highly dependent on global photospheric magnetic field maps, which serve as the boundary conditions to all coronal models that drive solar wind models. Unfortunately, less than half of the Sun’s photospheric magnetic field is reliably measured from any given vantage point and thus it is common for the maps to have highly dated and unreliable measurements in them. While Solar Obiter (SolO) now provides for the first time the opportunity to have simultaneous measurements of nearly the entire surface magnetic field of Sun (e.g., when SolO/PHI measurements are combined with those from SDO/HMI), the required alignment to accomplish this occurs only occasionally. Further, coronal models are extremely sensitive to the strengths of the polar magnetic fields of the Sun, which remain poorly observed. Recently, efforts to mitigate this problem include using flux transport models such as the Air Force Data Assimilative Photospheric Flux Transport (ADAPT) model, which evolves the field forward in time using well known transport processes occurring on the Sun. However, these models do not normally account for far-side emergence of new magnetic flux, which can significantly impact coronal and solar model predictions. The ADAPT model now includes the ability to include far-side active regions (e.g., determined via helioseismology or direct observation from Solar Orbiter) into the output maps it generates. Using newly developed tools for quantitatively comparing coronal and solar wind predictions with observations, we quantify the impact of including far-side active regions in ADAPT on coronal and solar wind predictions at Earth and STEREO A & B for multiple Carrington rotations in 2010 and 2011.
