New magnetohydrodynamic model available at NASA Community Coordinated Modeling Center

Abstract

The Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is a multi-agency partnership to enable, support and perform research and development for next-generation space science and space weather models. CCMC currently hosts nearly 100 numerical models and a cornerstone of this activity is the Runs on Request (RoR) system which allows anyone to request a model run and analyze/visualize the results via a web browser. CCMC is also active in the education community by organizing student research contests, heliophysics summer schools, and space weather forecaster training for students, government and industry representatives. We present a generic magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) model - PAMHD - that has been added to the CCMC RoR system which allows the study of a variety of fluid and plasma phenomena in one, two and three dimensions using a dynamic point-and-click web interface. Flexible initial and boundary conditions allow experimentation with a variety of plasma physics problems such as shocks, instabilities, planetary magnetospheres and astrophysical systems. Experimentation with numerical effects, e.g. resolution, solution method and boundary conditions, is also possible and can provide valuable context for space weather forecasters when interpreting observations or modeling results. We present an overview of the C++ implementation and show example results obtained through the CCMC RoR system, including the first to our knowledge MHD simulation of the interaction of the magnetospheres of Jupiter and Saturn in two dimensions.