Development of Multidimensional MHD Model for the Solar Corona and Solar Wind

We are developing a time stationary self-consistent 2D MHD model of the solar corona and solar wind that explicitly solves the energy equation, using a semi-empirical 2D MHD model of the corona to provide an empirically determined effective heat flux q_eff (i.e., the term effective means the possible presence of wave contributions). But, as our preliminary results indicate, in order to achieve high speed winds over the poles we also need to include the empirically determined effective pressure P_eff as a constraint in the momentum equation, which means that momentum addition by waves above 2 R_S are required to produce high speed winds. At present our calculations do not include the P_eff constraint. The estimates of P_eff and q_eff come from the semi-empirical 2D MHD model of the solar corona by Sittler and Guhathakurta (1999a,2002) which is based on Mk-III, Skylab and Ulysses observations. For future model development we plan to use SOHO LASCO, CDS, EIT, UVCS and Ulysses data as constraints for our model calculations. The model by Sittler and Guhathakurta (1999a, 2002) is not a self-consistent calculation. The calculations presented here is the first attempt at providing a self-consistent calculation based on empirical constraints.