Presentation #204.03 in the session Solar Magnetic Fields and the Corona.
At the base of the corona, our march towards increasingly higher-resolution photospheric and coronal measurements has revealed a close connection between macroscopic coronal processes and small-scale flux elements at the surface below. Understanding these links has important implications for how the corona is heated and how the fine-scale structuring of plasma is formed in the quiet-corona and nascent solar wind. In this presentation, we detail our ongoing effort to study this problem from a global coronal perspective by including a patch of extremely high-resolution surface fields within a global coronal thermodynamic magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) model. For a case-study near a coronal hole boundary, we construct a series of simulations that span two orders of magnitude in effective resolution at the surface, from that of a modest global calculation (≈2 degrees longitude) to that of the Hinode/SP instrument (≲0.02 degrees longitude). Using these, we study how the properties of the coronal solution change depending on both the resolution of the magnetic surface boundary condition, and on its data source (SDO/HMI or Hinode/SP). We find that the coronal hole boundary naturally becomes increasingly fragmented at high-resolution, and that the details of the solution depend on the structure, magnitude, and flux-balance of the fields in the high-resolution surface dataset (i.e. the data source and processing). Implications for flux-tube properties at the base of the corona and their relevance to coronal heating and solar wind properties will be discussed.