Observed and Simulated Power Spectra of Kinetic and Magnetic Energy retrieved with 2D inversions

TL;DR

This paper uses advanced 2D inversion techniques to accurately retrieve the power spectra of kinetic and magnetic energies at high spatial frequencies, revealing new insights into their scale-dependent behaviors and comparison with simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a 2D inversion method capable of recovering power spectra up to the diffraction limit, showing that the spectra have shallow slopes and differ from previous findings.

Findings

Power spectra extend to smaller scales with shallow slopes.

Observed slopes match recent local dynamo simulations.

Instrumental effects may influence vertical kinetic energy measurements.

Abstract

We try to retrieve the power spectra with certainty to the highest spatial frequencies allowed by current instrumentation. For this, we use 2D inversion code that were able to recover information up to the instrumental diffraction limit. The retrieved power spectra have shallow slopes extending further down to much smaller scales than found before. They seem not to show any power law. The observed slopes at subgranular scales agree with those obtained from recent local dynamo simulations. Small differences are found for vertical component of kinetic energy that suggest that observations suffer from an instrumental effect that is not taken into account.