Physics
Scientific paper
Dec 2011
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011agufmsm22b..08w&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2011, abstract #SM22B-08
Physics
[2740] Magnetospheric Physics / Magnetospheric Configuration And Dynamics, [2744] Magnetospheric Physics / Magnetotail, [2753] Magnetospheric Physics / Numerical Modeling, [2788] Magnetospheric Physics / Magnetic Storms And Substorms
Scientific paper
It has been over 30 years since the first attempts to model the entire solar wind, magnetosphere and ionosphere interaction self-consistently. From simple beginnings large scale models mostly based on self-consistent solutions of the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) conservation equations and the equations of electricity and magnetism have developed into a commonly used tool for studying the magnetosphere. Large scale models are driven by solar wind input. When driven by actual solar wind observations the results can be directly compared with in situ data. This enables us to verify the model which can then be used to investigate the magnetosphere in regions not observed. When compared with observations the models yield mixed results. Sometimes they do an excellent job of reproducing observations and sometimes they do a very poor job. The models have a number of limitations. Most do not include a ring current and therefore are of limited value during magnetic storms although combined MHD and ring current models are starting to appear. Magnetic reconnection is a dominant transport mechanism in the magnetosphere. This is either modeled by using numerical effects or by using a model of dissipation. The ionosphere is frequently based on empirical models of ionospheric conductance. Finally the models are completely dependent on the solar wind parameters used to drive the simulations. Even when based on observations we cannot be certain that a parcel of plasma observed far from the Earth actually interacts with the magnetosphere. We have begun a study to evaluate the effects of these limitations on the ability of the models to reproduce observations. The first step in our study was to evaluate when the influence of the solar wind observations on the overall configuration of the magnetosphere. We have found a number of intervals with multiple solar wind monitors, used observations from each as input to the simulations and compared the results with observations within the magnetosphere. We found that even small differences in the propagated solar wind can result in significant differences in the modeled magnetospheric configuration
Ashour-Abdalla Maha
El-Alaoui Mostafa
Walker Ray J.
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