Simulating Solar Coronal Mass Ejections Constrained by Observations of Their Speed and Poloidal Flux

We demonstrate how the parameters of a Gibson-Low flux-rope-based coronal mass ejection (CME) can be constrained using remote observations. Our Multi-Scale Fluid-Kinetic Simulation Suite has been used to simulate the propagation of a CME in a data-driven solar corona background computed using the photospheric magnetogram data. We constrain the CME model parameters using the observations of such key CME properties as its speed, orientation, and poloidal flux. The speed and orientation are estimated using multi-viewpoint white-light coronagraph images. The reconnected magnetic flux in the area covered by the post-eruption arcade is used to estimate the poloidal flux in the CME flux rope. We simulate the partial halo CME on 2011 March 7 to demonstrate the efficiency of our approach. This CME erupted with the speed of 812 km s−1 and its poloidal flux, as estimated from source active region data, was 4.9 × 1021 Mx. Using our approach, we were able to simulate this CME with the speed 840 km s−1 and the poloidal flux of 5.1 × 1021 Mx, in remarkable agreement with the observations.