AbbettAbstract - JSOC

In recent years, significant progress has been made in our ability to model the Sun's magnetic field over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, and over many physically-distinct regions of the solar atmosphere and interior. A wide range of numerical models of varying complexity are available to the Heliophysics research community, including magnetostatic models such as potential field and force-free extrapolations, and dynamic models such as radiative hydrodynamic solvers, and MHD codes. In addition, the quality and quantity of observational data continues to improve. These efforts do not proceed independently: synthetic data is routinely used to validate helioseismic and velocity inversion techniques, and observational data is used to validate, initiate, and in some cases drive numerical models. With an eye toward motivating discussion on how best the SDO data can be used to facilitate these investigations, I will briefly review recent progress toward assimilating data into models, and will describe some the theoretical challenges inherent to this process.