Magnetohydrodynamic coronal modelling with high-fidelity magnetograms

Abstract

To resolve coronal structures in detail, it is essential to constrain the coronal model using high-fidelity magnetograms with minimal smoothing. In this paper, we improve the numerical stability of COCONUT to enable efficient coronal MHD simulations driven directly by photospheric magnetograms, including magnetic field strengths exceeding 1000 Gauss (G), and then use it to investigate the impact of small-scale magnetic field structures that are typically filtered out of photospheric magnetograms on the coronal simulation results. We constrain this model with two types of magnetograms: the high-fidelity HMI photospheric magnetogram with only minor preprocessing through Gaussian smoothing, which preserves magnetic field strengths reaching 1500 G, and one processed using 50th-order filtered spherical harmonics, where the magnetic field strength is limited to below 100 G. The results demonstrate that the COCONUT can reproduce the large-scale coronal structures revealed by pB and EUV observations. Compared with the coronal MHD simulation constrained by a conventionally filtered magnetogram, the simulation constrained by the high-fidelity magnetogram yields approximately $50\%$ more OMF and produces EUV images that are more consistent with the observations. Moreover, the results show that when viewed from low latitudes in certain EUV passbands, such as the 193~Å channel, open-field regions near the solar poles may appear as bright structures that are typically associated with closed-field regions. This finding highlights the need for solar polar-orbiting missions to overcome the limitations and ambiguities arising from the restricted view of the polar regions from the ecliptic plane and to provide more complete full-Sun observations.