Speaker
Description
The solar wind is an uninterrupted flow of highly ionised plasma that streams from compact sources at or near the Sun and expands into the whole interplanetary space, being a major driver of space weather phenomena. Understanding the conditions that regulate the formation of the solar wind, its acceleration across the corona, and its transition to the heliospheric propagation regime is key to addressing many open questions in heliophysics. Physical links between observations of surface and coronal events with measurements made in-situ in the interplanetary medium are affected by the interplay between plasma flow and magnetic field, solar wind expansion and rotation, and steady and time-variable phenomena.
I will review on-going efforts in establishing connectivity across the corona and heliosphere, as well as recent advances in solar wind modelling and forecasting. I will address some of the main challenges related to the implementation and validation of connectivity and solar wind models, the delicate balance between physical accuracy and computational performance, as well as the pernicious issues that stem from the scarcity of observations made in between the two boundaries of the Sun–Earth system.
Results from data-driven global solar wind simulations that cover several solar activity cycles will be presented, highlighting relations of magnetic connectivity jumps with solar wind plasma signatures, their occurrence frequency and amplitudes at different epochs of the solar cycle, as well as the benefits of multiple of multiple points of observations (e.g L5 and off-ecliptic) for solar wind modelling.
