Tracking of supergranules - Does it make any sense?

TL;DR

This paper presents a new method for tracking supergranules in solar Dopplergrams to study large-scale photospheric flows, demonstrating its effectiveness through synthetic tests and case studies, and arguing its usefulness for understanding solar plasma dynamics.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel local correlation tracking method applied to Dopplergrams for analyzing supergranular motions and large-scale solar flows, validated with synthetic and helioseismology data.

Findings

Effective resolution of 60 arcseconds

Random error of 15 m/s in velocity measurements

Successful validation with synthetic and helioseismology data

Abstract

The motions of the plasma and structures in and below the solar photosphere is not well understood. The results obtained using various methods cannot be in general considered as consistent, especially in details. In this contribution we show a summary of the results obtained by the method we have developed recently. To study the photospheric dynamics we apply the local correlation tracking algorithm to the series of full-disc Dopplergrams obtained by Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) aboard the SOHO satelite. The dominant structure recorded in Dopplergrams is the supergranulation. Under the assumtion that the supergranules are carried by the flow field of the larger scale, we study properties of this underlying velocity field. We perform comparative tests with synthetic data with known properties and with results of the time-distance helioseismology with a great success. A few case studies are shown to demonstrate the performance of the method. We believe that tracking of supergranules makes a perfect sense when studying the large-scale flows in the solar photosphere. The method we demonstrate is suitable to detect large-scale velocity field with effective resolution of 60" and random error of 15 m/s. We believe that our method may provide a powerful tool for studies related to the dynamic behaviour of plasmas in the solar photosphere.