Comparative Study of MHD Modeling of the Background Solar Wind

Knowledge about the background solar wind plays a crucial role in the framework of space weather forecasting. In-situ measurements of the background solar wind are only available for a few points in the heliosphere where spacecraft are located, therefore we have to rely on heliospheric models to derive the distribution of solar wind parameters in interplanetary space. We test the performance of different solar wind models, namely Magnetohydrodynamic Algorithm outside a Sphere/ENLIL (MAS/ENLIL), Wang-Sheeley-Arge/ENLIL (WSA/ENLIL), and MAS/MAS, by comparing model results with in-situ measurements from spacecraft located at 1 AU distance to the Sun (ACE, Wind). To exclude the influence of interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs), we chose the year 2007 as a time period with low solar activity for our comparison. We found that the general structure of the background solar wind is well reproduced by all models. The best model results were obtained for the parameter solar wind speed. However, the predicted arrival times of high-speed solar wind streams have typical uncertainties of the order of about one day. Comparison of model runs with synoptic magnetic maps from different observatories revealed that the choice of the synoptic map significantly affects the model performance.
Comment: published on-line, Solar Physics, November 2013