3D Reconstruction of Interplanetary Scintillation (IPS) Remote-Sensing Data: Global Solar Wind Boundaries for Driving 3D-MHD Models

The University of California, San Diego, time-dependent analyses of the heliosphere provide three-dimensional (3D) reconstructions of solar wind velocities and densities from observations of interplanetary scintillation (IPS). Using data from the Solar-Terrestrial Environment Laboratory, Japan, these reconstructions provide a real-time prediction of the global solar-wind density and velocity throughout the whole heliosphere with a temporal cadence of about one day ( ips.ucsd.edu ). Updates to this modeling effort continue: in the present article, near-Sun results extracted from the time-dependent 3D reconstruction are used as inner boundary conditions to drive 3D-MHD models (e.g. ENLIL and H3D-MHD). This allows us to explore the differences between the IPS kinematic-model data-fitting procedure and current 3D-MHD modeling techniques. The differences in these techniques provide interesting insights into the physical principles governing the expulsion of coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Here we detail for the first time several specific CMEs and an induced shock that occurred in September 2011 that demonstrate some of the issues resulting from these analyses.