One contribution of 11 to a theme issue 'Dissipation and heating in solar wind turbulence' . Plasma in the Sun's hot corona expands into the heliosphere as a supersonic and highly magnetized solar wind. This paper provides an overview of our current understanding of how the corona is heated and how the solar wind is accelerated. Recent models of magnetohydrodynamic turbulence have progressed to the point of successfully predicting many observed properties of this complex, multi-scale system. However, it is not clear whether the heating in open-field regions comes mainly from the dissipation of turbulent fluctuations that are launched from the solar surface, or whether the chaotic 'magnetic carpet' in the low corona energizes the system via magnetic reconnection. To help pin down the physics, we also review some key observational results from ultraviolet spectroscopy of the collisionless outer corona.

The solar wind is connected to the Sun's atmosphere by flux tubes that are rooted in an ever-changing pattern of positive and negative magnetic polarities on the surface. Observations indicate that the magnetic field is filamentary and intermittent across a wide range of spatial scales. However, we do not know to what extent the complex flux tube topology seen near the Sun survives as the wind expands into interplanetary space. In order to study the possible long-distance connections between the corona and the heliosphere, we developed new models of turbulence-driven solar wind acceleration along empirically constrained field lines. We used a potential-field model of the Quiet Sun to trace field lines into the ecliptic plane with unprecedented spatial resolution at their footpoints. For each flux tube, a one-dimensional model was created with an existing wave/turbulence code that solves equations of mass, momentum, and energy conservation from the photosphere to 4 AU. To take account of stream-stream interactions between flux tubes, we used those models as inner boundary conditions for a time-steady MHD description of radial and longitudinal structure in the ecliptic. Corotating stream interactions smear out much of the smallest-scale variability, making it difficult to see how individual flux tubes on granular or supergranular scales can survive out to 1 AU. However, our models help clarify the level of "background" variability with which waves and turbulent eddies should be expected to interact. Also, the modeled fluctuations in magnetic field magnitude were seen to match measured power spectra quite well.

The solar chromosphere contains thin, highly dynamic strands of plasma known as spicules. Recently, it has been suggested that the smallest and fastest (Type II) spicules are identical to intermittent jets observed by the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph. These jets appear to expand out along open magnetic field lines rooted in unipolar network regions of coronal holes. In this paper we revisit a thirty-year-old idea that spicules may be caused by upward forces associated with Alfvén waves. These forces involve the conversion of transverse Alfvén waves into compressive acoustic-like waves that steepen into shocks. The repeated buffeting due to upward shock propagation causes nonthermal expansion of the chromosphere and a transient levitation of the transition region. Some older models of wave-driven spicules assumed sinusoidal wave inputs, but the solar atmosphere is highly turbulent and stochastic. Thus, we model this process using the output of a time-dependent simulation of reduced magnetohydrodynamic turbulence. The resulting mode-converted compressive waves are strongly variable in time, with a higher transition region occurring when the amplitudes are large and a lower transition region when the amplitudes are small. In this picture, the transition region bobs up and down by several Mm on timescales less than a minute. These motions produce narrow, intermittent extensions of the chromosphere that have similar properties as the observed jets and Type II spicules.

Forecasting models of the solar wind often rely on simple parameterizations of the magnetic field that ignore the effects of the full magnetic field geometry. In this paper, we present the results of two solar wind prediction models that consider the full magnetic field profile and include the effects of Alfvén waves on coronal heating and wind acceleration. The one-dimensional MHD code ZEPHYR self-consistently finds solar wind solutions without the need for empirical heating functions. Another 1D code, introduced in this paper (The Efficient Modified-Parker-Equation-Solving Tool, TEMPEST), can act as a smaller, stand-alone code for use in forecasting pipelines. TEMPEST is written in Python and will become a publicly available library of functions that is easy to adapt and expand. We discuss important relations between the magnetic field profile and properties of the solar wind that can be used to independently validate prediction models. ZEPHYR provides the foundation and calibration for TEMPEST, and ultimately we will use these models to predict observations and explain space weather created by the bulk solar wind. We are able to reproduce with both models the general anticorrelation seen in comparisons of observed wind speed at 1 AU and the flux tube expansion factor. There is significantly less spread than comparing the results of the two models than between ZEPHYR and a traditional flux tube expansion relation. We suggest that the new code, TEMPEST, will become a valuable tool in the forecasting of space weather.

We investigate several key questions of plasma heating in open-field regions of the corona that connect to the solar wind. We present results for a model of Alfvén-wave-driven turbulence for three typical open magnetic field structures: a polar coronal hole, an open flux tube neighboring an equatorial streamer, and an open flux tube near a strong-field active region. We compare time-steady, one-dimensional turbulent heating models (Cranmer et al. 2007) against fully time-dependent three-dimensional reduced-magnetohydrodynamics modeling of BRAID (van Ballegooijen et al. 2011). We find that the time-steady results agree well with time-averaged results from BRAID. The time-dependence allows us to investigate the variability of the magnetic fluctuations and of the heating in the corona. The high-frequency tail of the power spectrum of fluctuations forms a power law whose exponent varies with height, and we discuss the possible physical explanation for this behavior. The variability in the heating rate is bursty and nanoflare-like in nature, and we analyze the amount of energy lost via dissipative heating in transient events throughout the simulation. The average energy in these events is 10 21.91 erg, within the "picoflare" range, and many events reach classical "nanoflare" energies. We also estimated the multithermal distribution of temperatures that would result from the heating-rate variability, and found good agreement with observed widths of coronal differential emission measure (DEM) distributions. The results of the modeling presented in this paper provide compelling evidence that turbulent heating in the solar atmosphere by Alfvén waves accelerates the solar wind in open flux tubes. arXiv:1509.00377v1 [astro-ph.SR] 1 Sep 2015