These pages provide access to a suite of global MHD simulations relevant to the SDO mission. More details on the MHD approach can be found in the MAS User Guide. For simplicity, our simulations are all based on a specific Carrington rotation. That is, we use a photospheric magnetic field synoptic map built up from a sequence of observations centered at central meridian over a 27 day period. This map forms the fundamental boundary condition at the surface of the Sun, and is supplemented with auxiliary boundary conditions that approximate the plasma density and temperature.

These pages can be broadly categorized as mission-related, HMI-related and general tools. The mission-related pages provide access to spacecraft trajectory data, EUV & X-ray emission images and other general information related to SDO mission. Currently, we are focusing our efforts to support the HMI instrument although the tools should be useful for all SDO instruments. In addition to providing an interface to view images at specific time periods, we provide basic comparisons between the model results and data as well as visualizations that attempt to merge data and model results in ways that enhance the interpretation of the data. In addition, we hope that these comparisons provide a simple validation of the model results. At the least, when the comparisons between data and observations are poor, care should be taken when interpreting observations using the model results.

The GENERAL TOOLS section contains a suite of visualization and analysis tools. They are designed to allow users to interact with the MHD simulation results in a number of ways. Currently, we support coronal hole maps in longitude - latitude and spherical view, isosurfaces of the heliospheric current sheet, polarization brightness in solar corona, and field lines plots. In addition, the Summary Plots page displays an image gallery summarizing the salient parameters of a particular simulation. Finally, the Data Access page provides access to download the simulation data along with tools to visualize it.

These pages are our first attempt to provide modeling support for HMI and SDO mission, and thus a work in progress. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to contact us.