Validation of the PDFI_SS method for electric field inversions using a magnetic flux emergence simulation

Abstract

Knowledge of electric fields in the photosphere is required to calculate the electromagnetic energy flux through the photosphere and set up boundary conditions for data-driven magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of solar eruptions. Recently, the PDFI_SS method for inversions of electric fields from a sequence of vector magnetograms and Doppler velocity measurements was improved to incorporate spherical geometry and a staggered-grid description of variables. The method was previously validated using synthetic data from anelastic MHD (ANMHD) simulations. In this paper, we further validate the PDFI_SS method, using approximately one-hour long MHD simulation data of magnetic flux emergence from the upper convection zone into the solar atmosphere. We reconstruct photospheric electric fields and calculate the Poynting flux, and compare those to the actual values from the simulations. We find that the accuracy of the PDFI_SS reconstruction is quite good during the emergence phase of the simulated ephemeral active region evolution and decreases during the shearing phase. Analysing our results, we conclude that the more complex nature of the evolution (compared to the previously studied ANMHD case) that includes the shearing evolution phase is responsible for the obtained accuracy decrease.

Accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (8)

• Tracking Vector Magnetograms with the Magnetic Induction Equation
• Extension of the MURaM radiative MHD code for coronal simulations
• A Comprehensive Method of Estimating Electric Fields from Vector Magnetic Field and Doppler Measurements
• MHD simulations of the eruption of coronal flux ropes under coronal streamers
• The Coronal Global Evolutionary Model: Using HMI Vector Magnetogram and Doppler Data to Determine Coronal Magnetic Field Evolution
• Comparative Study of Data-driven Solar Coronal Field Models Using a Flux Emergence Simulation as a Ground-truth Data Set
• Probing the effect of cadence on the estimates of photospheric energy and helicity injections in eruptive active region NOAA AR 11158
• Sparse reconstruction of electric fields from radial magnetic data