KU Leuven Centre for mathematical Plasma-Astrophysics Seminar
Title: Of coronas and coconuts - The COCONUT solver for global coronal modelling
Speaker: Michaela Brchnelova - KU Leuven
Abstract
In 1989, a nine-hours long outage of the electrical transmission system happened in Quebec as a result of a geomagnetic storm. Since then, our dependency on electrical systems has only increased; these days with many of these systems being actually spaceborne, and thus lacking the protection of the Earth’s atmosphere. Space weather forecasting has thus gained a significant interest, with the involved parties hoping to be able to predict the geomagnetic activity and the influx of the Solar energetic particles to help protect both the ground-based and space-based infrastructure. Global coronal models are nowadays a popular tool for such solar weather predictions, resolving the dynamics of the Solar corona using Solar magnetograms. In this symposium, I will briefly introduce the new global coronal model developed at KU Leuven, COCONUT. I will discuss the numerical intricacies which we had to resolve to make the solver operational; and demonstrate how even details as small as the specific topology of the grid or the specific formulations of the boundary conditions can change the behaviour of the solver completely. The topic of this seminar will be followed up by a seminar by B. Perri in June, who will demonstrate the performance of COCONUT when compared to observational data.
The seminars are in hybrid mode, you can follow in person in room 200B 02.16 or online at the (permanent) link:
https://eu.bbcollab.com/guest/7406a5ec00dc4ec6948200f9c769d454
