Presentation #111.11 in the session Understanding the Formation and Evolution of Ambient and Transient Solar Wind Outflow — Poster Session.
The FORWARD toolset is a set of codes intended for forward modeling various coronal and heliospheric observables, and for accessing and comparing them to existing data. Given a model of the physical state of the plasma and magnetic field, the code can produce many different synthetic observables (multiwavelength, spectropolarimetric) , as well as ground-truth plots of model plasma properties (e.g., density, magnetic field, etc.). Here we present some of the newest innovations in FORWARD, in particular new models and observables designed to investigate capabilities and plan for analysis of the upcoming NASA PUNCH mission, and additional new UV spectropolarimetric observables of the lower and middle corona that, combined with already existing capabilities, are useful for planning for future missions, including the COMPLETE mission concept submitted to the Heliophysics Decadal Survey.
We use two separate models to generate plasma parameters that can be passed into FORWARD:
To generate white light brightness and polarization diagnostics (PUNCH observables) that span 5.5–180 solar radii, we use the Grid Agnostic MHD for Extended Research Applications (GAMERA model). GAMERA is an magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulation tool for simulating diverse magnetized plasma environments. It builds upon and improves the high-heritage Lyon-Fedder-Mobarry (LFM) code, including a high degree of optimization, minimal dependence on external libraries, and multiple numeric upgrades.
To generate lower and middle corona EUV and UV spectropolarimetric observables (COMPLETE observables) out to 6 solar radii, we use the Predictive Science (PSI) Magnetohydrodynamic Algorithm outside a Sphere (MAS) code with FORWARD. MAS integrates the time-dependent resistive thermodynamic magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equations in three-dimensional spherical coordinates to generate plasma properties.