Modeling Alfvén wave acceleration of the solar wind

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 that includes the momentum and energy addition from Alfvén waves propagating away from the Sun. The WKB approach is employed to statistically describe the effect of Alfvén waves on the background flow and vice versa. This approximation is appropriate for the waves with wavelengths shorter than local characteristic scales and does not require a high resolution description of the momentum and energy transformation between the waves and the flow. We compare output from the model with Ulysses observations and show that the wave-drive model reproduces the bimodal structure of the solar wind observed by Ulysses.