Authors: Christopher Rowell, Dr. Ming Zhang

Solar wind parameters are continuously monitored by spacecraft orbiting Earth. It is desirable to know when a solar wind stream was released from the sun so that it can be linked to its origins and magnetic connectivity between Earth and the solar corona can be found. The purpose of this work is to develop MHD simulation software capable of operating forward and backward in time. Ultimately, the software will rely on time series data collected around Earth to trace solar wind features back in time and, in doing so, determine when and where on the sun a stream came from. The nature of such a project can quickly become problematic since, in many cases, the simulation’s governing equations are time-irreversible. To get around this while also avoiding mathematical manipulations to generate reversibility, the project exploits the minimally diffusive nature of the solar wind to approximate reverse time flow. Time parity is instead applied only to the input data, which allows for the software to readily simulate forward and backward time flow with minimal code adjustments. While the code is in development, the compressible Euler equations serve to test its functionality.