Three‐dimensional MHD Simulation of the 2003 October 28 Coronal Mass Ejection: Comparison with LASCO Coronagraph Observations

Abstract

We numerically model the coronal mass ejection (CME) event of 2003 October 28 that erupted from AR 10486 and propagated to Earth in less than 20 hr, causing severe geomagnetic storms. The magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) model is formulated by first arriving at a steady state corona and solar wind employing synoptic magnetograms. We initiate two CMEs from the same active region, one approximately a day earlier that preconditions the solar wind for the much faster CME on the 28th. This second CME travels through the corona at a rate of over 2500 km s À1 , driving a strong forward shock. We clearly identify this shock in an image produced by the Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) C3 and reproduce the shock and its appearance in synthetic white-light images from the simulation. We find excellent agreement with both the general morphology and the quantitative brightness of the model CME with LASCO observations. These results demonstrate that the CME shape is largely determined by its interaction with the ambient solar wind and may not be sensitive to the initiation process. We then show how the CME would appear as observed by wide-angle coronagraphs on board the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft. We find complex time evolution of the white-light images as a result of the way in which the density structures pass through the Thomson sphere. The simulation is performed with the Space Weather Modeling Framework (SWMF).

Mean shape of interplanetary shocks deduced from in situ observations and its relation with interplanetary CMEs

“…Indeed, these deformations are seen within simulations that initialize a CME with a flux rope, which is out of equilibrium in the corona (e.g. Manchester et al 2008;Taubenschuss et al 2010), and are seen even more in simulations that initialize a CME within the solar wind with a pressure pulse, since there is no intrinsic CME magnetic field to insure an internal coherence (e.g., Lee et al 2013;Xie et al 2013). However, the characteristics of the deformation depend on many parameters, including the geometry of the interaction, the relative orientation in particular, and strength of the magnetic field within the flux-rope and the solar wind.…”

Magnetic Field Configuration Models and Reconstruction Methods for Interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejections

“…In these simulations, synthetic satellite measurements made at 1 AU show a typical ICME structure with a fast shock, preceding a dense sheath and an ejecta. Synthetic coronagraphic and heliospheric images are also able to reproduce typical views of CMEs (Lugaz, Manchester, and Gombosi, 2005;Manchester et al, 2008;Riley et al, 2008;Lugaz et al, 2009;Odstrcil and Pizzo, 2009). Riley et al (2004) made a comparison of magnetic field reconstruction and fitting models for ICMEs, by fitting two different time series of a simulated ICME to five different techniques: three force-free models, the elliptical model by Hidalgo, Nieves-Chinchilla, and Cid (2002) and the Grad-Shafravov reconstruction code.…”

High-order central ENO finite-volume scheme for ideal MHD

“…For example, accurate capturing of detailed flow features in space-physics problems is numerically challenging due to the presence of a wide variety of temporal and spatial scales on which interesting plasma physics phenomena occur throughout the vast domains associated with the large-scale space-weather environment. Numerical solutions of the equations arising in the modelling of these complex flows are computationally intensive and are only feasible on massively parallel computers [1,2,3,4]. Therefore, numerical algorithms capable of efficiently resolving the solution features of these flows and of reducing the time required to obtain numerical solutions of these problems are an invaluable asset to research communities in the aforementioned fields.…”