- Yihua Li
Nanjing University, School of Astronomy and Space Science
GitHub: @lavenderLi09
Email: yihuali@smail.nju.edu.cn
- Guoyin Chen
Nanjing University, School of Astronomy and Space Science / Rosseland Centre for Solar Physics, University of Oslo
GitHub: @gychen-NJU
We thank all the contributors for their valuable input and support.
MagWind is a comprehensive tool for modeling the global solar coronal magnetic field, designed to support solar physics research and space weather forecasting. This package implements three magnetic field extrapolation models, including the PFSS (Potential Field Source Surface), SCS (Schatten Current Sheet), and OFF (OutFlow Field), providing researchers with a flexible framework to reconstruct coronal magnetic structures from photospheric and source surface boundary conditions.
By integrating traditional potential field approaches with advanced magneto-frictional methods that account for solar wind outflow, MagWind aims to:
- Provide efficient, parallelized computation (CPU/GPU) for large-scale magnetic field reconstruction.
- Offer comparative analysis between potential (current-free) and non-potential field configurations.
- Facilitate the study of open magnetic flux, coronal holes, and the heliospheric current sheet under varying solar activity conditions.
The Potential-field Source-surface (PFSS) model offers a straightforward way to represent the global coronal magnetic field. It assumes that electric currents in the corona have minimal impact on the large-scale field structure, therefore, the over-all magnetic field can be simplied to a potential field. We compute the PFSS model using spherical harmonics with the lower-boundary data from SDO/HMI synoptic maps. The code can perform parallel computations on both CPU and GPU.
The Schatten Current Sheet (SCS) model is an empirical magnetostatic model that describes the large-scale coronal and heliospheric magnetic field structure, which is proposed in ([https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1969SoPh....6..442S/abstract]). The model assumes that the coronal magnetic field can be approximated by a potential field in the solar corona, which transitions to a radial (current-free) configuration beyond a source surface, typically placed at 2.5 solar radii.
Key features:
- Source Surface: Assumes the magnetic field becomes radial at a specified radius
- Current Sheet: Describes the heliospheric current sheet separating opposite magnetic polarities
- Applications: Solar wind modeling, heliospheric field structure, space weather prediction
Based on Rice & Yeates, 2021 ([https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac2c71]), the outflow field is a global solar magnetic field model that obtained from a magneto-frictional equbilirium, which contains a Parker solar wind profile in the magneto-frictional equation. Compared to the PFSS model, it provides different open fluxes by adjusting on the solar wind velocity, thereby allowing flexible adaptation based on different solar activity and specialties of events.