Validation of the PDFI_SS Electric Field Inversion Method Using MHD Simulations of Magnetic Flux Emergence

Abstract:

Knowledge of the vector electric field in the photosphere is useful for calculations of the energy flux through the photosphere and for boundary conditions for data-driven simulations of the evolving active regions. Recently, the PDFI_SS method for estimating electric fields from vector magnetic fields and Doppler velocities was improved to incorporate the spherical geometry and a staggered-grid description (Fisher et al. 2020). The method was previously validated using synthetic input data from an anelastic magnetohydrodynamic simulation (ANMHD). In this study, we further test the PDFI_SS method using synthetic data from a more realistic flux emergence MHD simulation. We use the output of the MHD simulations to perform the electric field inversions at the photosphere and compare these to the known fields in the simulation. We present results for different components of the electric field vector and the Poynting flux. We discuss the similarities and the differences, in particular, due to the complex structure of horizontal plasma flows in the regions of high smooth magnetic fields.