Combining local and global magnetohydrodynamic simulation frameworks to understand the evolution of coronal mass ejections

Abstract

Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are one of the primary sources of space weather disturbances and associated geomagnetic storms on Earth. Magnetohydrodynamic simulations of magnetic flux ropes are being actively investigated as a method for forecasting CME arrival times, the distributions of the solar wind plasma, and the magnetic field. To succeed, it is important to constrain the properties of such flux ropes using observations. Local simulations of the solar corona make it possible to model CME eruptions, provided that the observational data are sufficient to specify adequate boundary conditions at the solar surface. However, these simulations are limited to local, wedge-shaped domains of the solar corona because global modeling of such eruptions can be too computationally expensive. In this work, we demonstrate that it is possible to perform global simulations of flux ropes by extracting their properties obtained in the local domain and inserting them into a global model. We do that using local solutions in a wedge-shaped domain between R⊙≤r≤6R⊙, which are inserted into a fully-spherical global corona background between 1.03≤r≤30R⊙. We also provide a detailed discussion of our simulation results, both in the local and global domains.