SIP-CESE MHD model of solar wind with adaptive mesh refinement of hexahedral meshes

Solar–interplanetary space involvesmany features, such as discontinuities and heliospheric current sheet, with spatial scales many orders of magnitude smaller than the system size. The scalable, massively parallel, block-based, adaptive-mesh refinement (AMR) promises to resolve different temporal and spatial scales on which solar-wind plasma occurs throughout the vast solar–interplanetary space with even less cells but can generate a good enough resolution. Here, we carry out the adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) implementation of our Solar–Interplanetary space–time conservation element and solution element (CESE) magnetohydrodynamic model (SIP-CESE MHD model) using a six-component grid system (Feng et al., 2007, 2010). The AMR realization of the SIP-CESE MHD model is naturalized directly in hexahedral meshes with the aid of the parallel AMR package PARAMESH available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/paramesh/. At the same time, the topology of themagnetic field expansion factor and theminimum angular separation (at the photosphere) between an open field foot point and its nearest coronal-hole boundary are merged into the model in order to determine the volumetric heating source terms. Our numerical results for the validation study of the solar-wind background of Carrington rotation 2060 show overall good agreements in the solar corona and in interplanetary space with the observations from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and spacecraft data from OMNI. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.