How’s the weather up there? Understanding our Sun’s chromospheric dynamics is important to understanding the Sun’s corona – which is, in turn, vital to understanding and predicting Earth’s space weather. This National Science Foundation-funded project looks at space weather phenomena and how it affects life down here.

About Solar Atmospheric Modeling
Under funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), WVHTC Foundation team members are actively researching and modeling solar atmospheric dynamics, in an effort to better understand its effect on this planet.

Of particular focus are the Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) processes that play a major role in chromospheric dynamics. MHD simulations conducted at the WVHTC Foundation are based on models that include a realistic representation of transport processes (e.g., electrical and thermal conduction, viscosity, thermoelectric effects, and particle diffusion) that are needed to understand chromospheric dynamics.

Significant Accomplishments:
• WVHTC Foundation team members appear to have developed the only MHD simulation of chromospheric dynamics based on a model that includes a complete, space and time dependent electrical conductivity tensor, the effect of gravity, and an energy equation for a variably ionized, variably magnetized, multi-species plasma.
• WVHTC Foundation’s Solar Atmosphere Modeling is now researching the importance of the HI and proton viscosity tensors, including the effect of proton magnetization, in chromospheric heating by developing a 1.5 D steady state, finite thickness shock wave model, and a 2.5 D linear wave model. Both models include viscosity and electrical conductivity tensors. These models the role of electrical conductivity tensor in chromospheric heating.