A HYBRID SOLAR WIND MODEL OF THE CESE+HLL METHOD WITH A YIN-YANG OVERSET GRID AND AN AMR GRID

Abstract

A hybrid three-dimensional (3D) MHD model for solar wind study is proposed in the present paper with combined grid systems and solvers. The computational domain from the Sun to Earth space is decomposed into the near-Sun and off-Sun domains, which are respectively constructed with a Yin-Yang overset grid system and a Cartesian adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) grid system and coupled with a domain connection interface in the overlapping region between the near-Sun and off-Sun domains. The space-time conservation element and solution element method is used in the near-Sun domain, while the Harten-Lax-Leer method is employed in the off-Sun domain. The Yin-Yang overset grid can avoid well-known singularity and polar grid convergence problems and its body-fitting property helps achieve high-quality resolution near the solar surface. The block structured AMR Cartesian grid can automatically capture far-field plasma flow features, such as heliospheric current sheets and shock waves, and at the same time, it can save significant computational resources compared to the uniformly structured Cartesian grid. A numerical study of the solar wind structure for Carrington rotation 2069 shows that the newly developed hybrid MHD solar wind model successfully produces many realistic features of the background solar wind, in both the solar corona and interplanetary space, by comparisons with multiple solar and interplanetary observations.