Incorporating Surface Convection into a 3D Babcock-Leighton Solar Dynamo Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces the first 3D Babcock-Leighton solar dynamo model that explicitly incorporates realistic surface convective flows, revealing their impact on magnetic field evolution and highlighting limitations of traditional turbulent diffusion approaches.

Contribution

It presents a novel 3D kinematic flux-transport model with explicit convective flows, demonstrating their effects on solar magnetic cycle simulation and identifying challenges like small-scale dynamo disruption.

Findings

Convective flows improve surface flux evolution modeling.

Turbulent diffusivity underestimates dynamo efficiency.

Explicit convection produces polar bands not seen in observations.

Abstract

The observed convective flows on the photosphere (e.g., supergranulation, granulation) play a key role in the Babcock-Leighton (BL) process to generate large-scale polar fields from sunspots fields. In most surface flux transport (SFT) and BL dynamo models, the dispersal and migration of surface fields is modeled as an effective turbulent diffusion. Recent SFT models have incorporated explicit, realistic convective flows in order to improve the fidelity of convective transport but, to our knowledge, this has not yet been implemented in previous BL models. Since most Flux-Transport (FT)/BL models are axisymmetric, they do not have the capacity to include such flows. We present the first kinematic 3D FT/BL model to explicitly incorporate realistic convective flows based on solar observations. Though we describe a means to generalize these flows to 3D, we find that the kinematic small-scale dynamo action they produce disrupts the operation of the cyclic dynamo. Cyclic solution is found by limiting the convective flow to act only on the vertical radial component of the magnetic field. The results obtained are generally in good agreement with the observed surface flux evolution and with non-convective models that have a turbulent diffusivity on the order of $3 \times 10^{12}$ cm$^2$ s$^{-1}$ (300 km$^2$ s$^{-1}$). However, we find that the use of a turbulent diffusivity underestimates the dynamo efficiency, producing weaker mean fields and shorter cycle than in the convective models. Also, the convective models exhibit mixed polarity bands in the polar regions that have no counterpart in solar observations. Also, the explicitly computed turbulent electromotive force (emf) bears little resemblance to a diffusive flux. We also find that the poleward migration speed of poloidal flux is determined mainly by the meridional flow and the vertical diffusion.