Authors: Caroline L. Evans (University of Colorado Boulder), Cooper Downs (Predictive Science, Inc.), Don Schmit (Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences), James Crowley (University of Colorado Boulder)

Astrophysical simulations require trade-offs between compute time and physical accuracy. This frequently includes targeting certain physical scales at the expense of others. Simulations investigating solar coronal heating and solar wind acceleration usually select either high resolution for a small domain or low resolution for a global domain. Bridging this gap requires linking structures present on the solar surface to both the middle corona (approximately 1.5 – 6 solar radii) and the solar wind. In this work, we analyze three simulations of the global solar corona that vary the resolution of the surface boundary condition while keeping the same parameterization of a thermodynamic, wave-turbulence-driven magnetohydrodynamic model. We quantify structural differences endemic to each simulation using spherical harmonic decomposition and associated statistics. We analyze how surface resolution influences heating and magnetic complexity in the corona and solar wind. We describe a one-to-one correlation between the structure of the magnetic field and heating in the low corona and calculate 40% more heating in our best resolution simulation. In principle, these results can enable more efficient subgrid modeling in future low-resolution simulations.