 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
2004 SCIENCE NEWS
11.01.04 - Simulations Help Analyze, Prepare for Solar Events
Scientists in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division's Physics Simulation and Modeling Office, in collaboration with scientists from the High-Altitude Observatory, in Boulder, Colorado, are generating three-dimensional simulations of the sun's entire outer region to study solar conditions.
Activity near the surface of the sun - for example, coronal mass ejections (CMEs) - is a major source of space weather that impacts space exploration, satellite operations, power grids, communications, and other aspects of modern life. Understanding the changing flow of energy and matter throughout the sun has been established as one of NASA's objectives. Plans to achieve this goal include support of observational instruments and work in modeling the large-scale dynamics of the sun.
The NAS-HAO team is generating solar simulations with the anelastic spherical harmonic (ASH) code running on Lomax, a 600-processor SGI Origin parallel processor computer. Parameters such as radial entropy profiles and boundary conditions have been varied in an attempt to match solar conditions, particularly the observed latitudinal and radial variation of the differential solar rotation.
Better understanding and predictability of solar events, such as CMEs and solar winds, will enable better preparation for, and protection against such events, both in space and on earth. These events are closely tied to the solar magnetic field, the evolution of which is controlled by the convective region of the sun.
The team's next milestone is to generate artificial helioseismic data (generated by oscillations on the surface of the sun caused by sound waves) that will be used to test, calibrate, and develop inversion methods to be used on data from solar observations. To achieve this milestone, the team plans to generate large simulations that closely approximate data obtained from actual solar measurements.
|
|
|
|
ARCHIVE
|
|
|
