A. V. Usmanov, M. L. Goldstein, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA
We
present a fully three-dimensional steady-state MHD model of the solar corona
and solar wind. Our simulation approach includes (i) decomposition of our
computational domain into three regions (I: 1-20 solar radii, II: 20 solar
radii - 1 AU, and III: 1-100 AU), (ii) incorporation of Alfvén waves as an
additional source of energy and momentum for solar wind flow,
and (iii) account for the effects of pickup protons in the distant
heliosphere. The time relaxation technique is applied to obtain a
steady-state solution in region I and the marching-along-radius method is
employed in regions II and III. The relaxation code is written to run on
massively parallel computers under the Message Passing Interface. The
governing equations are solved in spherical coordinates; in order to
circumvent the geometrical singularity on pole, we employ a composite grid
consisting of three overlapping fragments of spherical grids. We produce
realistic simulations of the solar corona and solar wind as determined by
boundary conditions at the base of solar corona and compare model output
with spacecraft data.