Why Do Solar Wind Models Get It Wrong? Understanding the Capabilities of Time-dependent Solar Wind Simulations

Abstract We explore the capabilities of time-dependent (TD) magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) solar wind simulations with the coupled Wang–Sheeley–Arge (WSA) model of the solar corona and the Grid Agnostic MHD for Extended Research Applications model of the inner heliosphere. We compare TD with steady-state (SS) simulations and in situ observations from multiple spacecraft (Earth, STEREO-A, Parker Solar Probe). We show that TD predictions, although better than SS predictions, substantially mispredict the solar wind at different heliospheric locations. We identified three reasons for that: (1) the uncalibrated WSA velocity formula used to generate solar wind velocities at the inner boundary of a heliospheric domain, (2) the extraction of the WSA boundary conditions for input into MHD models very high in the corona, and (3) the abrupt and partial emergence of active regions from the solar east limb. Evaluation of 1 year of TD predictions at the Earth and STEREO-A locations shows that tuning accordingly the WSA relationship when used with MHD models and extracting the WSA boundary conditions lower in the corona (at 5 R s instead of 21.5 R s ) can lead to improved predictions. However, the abrupt emergence of active regions from the east limb of the Sun, which can highly disrupt the magnetic field topology in the corona, is a difficult task to deal with since complete knowledge of the conditions on the solar far side is not currently available. Solar Orbiter Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager data can help mitigate this effect; however, unless we get a 4 π view of the Sun, we will be unable to completely address it.