Identification

Title

A comparison of spectral element and finite difference methods using statically refined nonconforming grids for the MHD island coalescence instability problem

Abstract

A recently developed spectral-element adaptive refinement incompressible magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) code is applied to simulate the problem of MHD island coalescence instability (MICI) in two dimensions. MICI is a fundamental MHD process that can produce sharp current layers and subsequent reconnection and heating in a high-Lundquist number plasma such as the solar corona. Because of the formation of thin current layers, it is highly desirable to use adaptively or statically refined grids to resolve them and to maintain accuracy at the same time. The output of the spectral-element static adaptive refinement simulations are compared with simulations using a finite-difference method on the same refinement grids, and both methods are compared to pseudospectral simulations with uniform grids as baselines. It is shown that with the statically refined grids roughly scaling linearly with effective resolution, spectral element runs can maintain accuracy significantly higher than that of the finite-difference runs, in some cases achieving close to full spectral accuracy.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7gm88m3

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2008-08-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact