Speaker
Description
The evolution of magnetic flux on the solar photosphere is a highly dynamic process, featuring processes such as active region emergence, which can exhibit significant variability. Since these processes may occur on the far side of the Sun, our ability to construct accurate representations of the photospheric field for coronal modelling is constrained by the limited field-of-view provided by magnetograms taken from the Sun-Earth line. Here, we consider a magnetofrictional "ground truth" Reference Sun simulation spanning two solar cycles, that includes surface flux transport and bipole emergence. From this reference, we extract Carrington rotation maps (synthetic synoptic magnetograms) and use these to constrain the photosphere in limited-data simulations. Comparing these two studies reveals that the limited-data simulations significantly underpredict global quantities such as open flux and energy compared to the reference sun model. The spatial extent of footpoints of the open magnetic field is similarly underpredicted by models constrained by these synthetic synoptic magnetograms.
