Can an Unobserved Concentration of Magnetic Flux Above the Poles of the Sun Resolve the Open Flux Problem?

Global models of the extended solar corona, driven by observed photospheric magnetic fields, generally cannot reproduce the amplitude of the measured interplanetary magnetic field at 1 au (or elsewhere in the heliosphere), often underestimating it by a factor of two or more. Some modelers have attempted to resolve this "open flux" problem by adjusting what they believe to be errors in the estimates of the photospheric field values. Others have...