Identification

Title

The role of subsurface flows in solar surface convection: Modeling the spectrum of supergranular and larger scale flows

Abstract

We model the solar horizontal velocity power spectrum at scales larger than granulation using a two-component approximation to the mass continuity equation. The model takes four times the density scale height as the integral (driving) scale of the vertical motions at each depth. Scales larger than this decay with height from the deeper layers. Those smaller are assumed to follow a Kolmogorov turbulent cascade, with the total power in the vertical convective motions matching that required to transport the solar luminosity in a mixing length formulation. These model components are validated using large-scale radiative hydrodynamic simulations. We reach two primary conclusions. (1) The model predicts significantly more power at low wavenumbers than is observed in the solar photospheric horizontal velocity spectrum. (2) Ionization plays a minor role in shaping the observed solar velocity spectrum by reducing convective amplitudes in the regions of partial helium ionization. The excess low wavenumber power is also seen in the fully nonlinear three-dimensional radiative hydrodynamic simulations employing a realistic equation of state. This adds to other recent evidence suggesting that the amplitudes of large-scale convective motions in the Sun are significantly lower than expected. Employing the same feature tracking algorithm used with observational data on the simulation output, we show that the observed low wavenumber power can be reproduced in hydrodynamic models if the amplitudes of large-scale modes in the deep layers are artificially reduced. Since the large-scale modes have reduced amplitudes, modes on the scale of supergranulation and smaller remain important to convective heat flux even in the deep layers, suggesting that small-scale convective correlations are maintained through the bulk of the solar convection zone.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7tt4shm

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2014-09-02T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact