Quantifying how surface complexity influences properties of the solar corona and solar wind

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 use this information to examine how surface resolution influences heating and magnetic complexity in the corona and solar wind and the subsequent impacts on density, temperature, and flow structure. In principle, this can enable more efficient subgrid modeling in future low resolution simulations.