Model Integration Team

The Team seeks to:

• Determine what simulations and model developments will most effectively accomplish COFFIES science goals in a timely manner
• Examine ongoing and proposed Science Team efforts to determine where simulation and modeling can best add to those efforts
• Evaluate existing models and codes to determine where they require enhancement to meet those goals
• Determine which requirements will involve multiple codes operating in a cooperative manner and implement modifications to allow such code-code interaction
• Implement and test code and model developments and evaluate their effectiveness
• Consider how simulations may be used to connect the results of two or more Science Teams with each other and implement simulations to elucidate those connections to forward the overarching COFFIES goal of connecting interior and exterior dynamics

The Team seeks to improve existing codes in several ways that will add in achieving COFFIES Goals and answering its Science Questions.

Categories of such improvements are:

• Enhancing the ability of codes to use finer spatial meshes, to run for longer solar times, and to cover larger and/or more diverse physical domains, including in some cases parts of the Sun that the code may not have been originally designed to simulate.
• Development of new and improved models for quantities and phenomena required by the simulations that cannot feasibly be produced by the simulations themselves, such as subgrid turbulence models, RANS (Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes) models, and radiation models.
• Enhancing the ability of codes to collaborate in their production of results, either in the sense of allowing transparent incorporation of a given simulation’s output as another’s input, of one simulation’s small-scale results to be used as another’s subgrid model, of one simulation’s large-scale results acting as another’s boundary or volumetric driving terms, or of two or more simulations cooperatively feeding each other quantitative data in a fully synchronized run-time manner.
• Improving the overall cooperative nature of all relevant codes in each subproject, to achieve levels of efficiency, robustness, and general ease-of-use required by a tightly linked effort such as COFFIES.

Initial activities include:

• Seminars and discussions among team members to create a knowledge-base of existing codes, models, and databases available to the COFFIES membership
• Discussion within the team concerning how each of the existing codes/models meets COFFIES needs
• Discussion of where within those needs there are shortcomings with regard to simulation and modeling and how those shortcomings may be addressed
• Discussion of modeling needs within the simulation efforts of COFFIES, both present and future; two clear shortcomings of current models required for both interior and exterior simulations are subgrid resistivity and subgrid magnetic reconnection models

Long-term activities and collaborations with the Science Teams include:

• Discover and verify connections between solar interior processes and their external manifestations—with the Surface Links and Convection Teams.
• Improve the analysis of observational data to refine its contribution to our knowledge of solar physics—with the Helioseismology and Surface Links Teams.
• Create predictive procedures for understanding the solar cycle and space weather production generally—with the Convection, Dynamo, and Surface Links Teams.
• Advance toward a complete model of the solar dynamo and the internal flows of mass and energy that drive it—with the Dynamo and Convection Teams.

Team Members

The following people are currently on the Model Integration Team: