2012/06/10 by Chaowei Jiang, Xueshang Feng, Changqing Xiang · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph.SR
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0004-637x/755/1/62
Accepted by ApJ, 26 pages, 10 figures
arxiv created 2012/06/10 · arxiv updated 2015/06/05
Reliable measurements of the solar magnetic field are still restricted to the photosphere, and our present knowledge of the three-dimensional coronal magnetic field is largely based on extrapolation from photospheric magnetogram using physical models, e.g., the nonlinear force-free field (NLFFF) model as usually adopted. Most of the currently available NLFFF codes have been developed with computational volume like Cartesian box or spherical wedge while a global full-sphere extrapolation is still under developing. A high-performance global extrapolation code is in particular urgently needed considering that Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) can provide full-disk magnetogram with resolution up to 4096× 4096. In this work, we present a new parallelized code for global NLFFF extrapolation with the photosphere magnetogram as input. The method is based on magnetohydrodynamics relaxation approach, the CESE-MHD numerical scheme and a Yin-Yang spherical grid that is used to overcome the polar problems of the standard spherical grid. The code is validated by two full-sphere force-free solutions from Low & Lou's semi-analytic force-free field model. The code shows high accuracy and fast convergence, and can be ready for future practical application if combined with an adaptive mesh refinement technique.