THE VIABILITY OF OHMIC DISSIPATION AS A CORONAL HEATING SOURCE

We have performed three-dimensional numerical simulations of the coron al heating model proposed by Parker (1972,1994) and have studied the s teady state power balance between Poynting flux (P) and ohmic dissipat ion (Q). We demonstrate that this power balance exists and how P and Q scale with the driving velocity, granular coherence time, and loop le ngth. We show that both P and Q compare well with the Markovian limit of the order-of-magnitude estimate given by Parker (1983). Our results further indicate a weak positive-exponent scaling with the Lundquist (conductivity) number. These results imply that line-tied photospheric convection can drive large enough current densities in the corona to make Parker's mechanism feasible.