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An asynchronous and parallel time-marching method: Application to three-dimensional MHD simulation of solar wind

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Abstract

An asynchronous and parallel time-marching method for three-dimensional (3D) time-dependent magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulation is used for large-scale solar wind simulation. It uses different local time steps in the corona and the heliosphere according to the local Courant-Friedrichs-Levy (CFL) conditions. The solar wind background with observed solar photospheric magnetic field as input is first presented. The simulation time for the background solar wind by using the asynchronous method is <1/6 of that by using the normal synchronous time-marching method with the same computation precision. Then, we choose the coronal mass ejection (CME) event of 13 November, 2003 as a test case. The time-dependent variations of the pressure and the velocity configured from a CME model at the inner boundary are applied to generate transient structures in order to study the dynamical interaction of a CME with the background solar wind flow between 1 and 230 Rs. This time-marching method is very effective in terms of computation time for large-scale 3D time-dependent numerical MHD problem. In this validation study, we find that this 3D MHD model, with the asynchronous and parallel time-marching method, provides a relatively satisfactory comparison with the ACE spacecraft observations at L1 point.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. SIGMA Weather Group, State Key Laboratory for Space Weather, Center for Space Science and Applied Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Fang Shen, XueShang Feng & WenBin Song

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  1. Fang Shen
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  2. XueShang Feng
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  3. WenBin Song
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Correspondence to Fang Shen.

Additional information

Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 40874077, 40621003, 40874091, 40536029, 40523006 and 40604019), the National Basic Research Program of China (“973” Project) (Grant No. 2006CB806304), and the Specialized Research Fund for State Key Laboratories

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Shen, F., Feng, X. & Song, W. An asynchronous and parallel time-marching method: Application to three-dimensional MHD simulation of solar wind. Sci. China Ser. E-Technol. Sci. 52, 2895–2902 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-009-0291-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-009-0291-1

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