Energy release in a turbulent three-dimensional corona

Recently a lot of theoretical evidence has emerged in support of the hypothesis that coronal dissipation occurs in bursts at very small spatial scales. In this picture, a large number of coherently triggered, unobservable bursts is what appears as one of the many observed solar events (e.g., flares, blinkers, flashes, etc.). Most previous computational studies of this process have been limited to two or two and one half spatial dimensions.. In addition, an incompressible model has been used. This is problematical, since the solar corona is three-dimensional and compressible as well. Furthermore, it is unclear how good an approximation reduced magnetohydrodynamics is in the compressible situation. Here we present the first results of our coronal dissipation calculations using a three-dimensional, compressible model. We solve the MHD equations with CRUNCH3D, a massively parallel, viscoresistive, three-dimensional compressible MHD code. The code employs a Fourier collocation spatial discretization, and uses a second-order Runge-Kutta temporal discretization. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of COSPAR.