Effects of spatial resolution on inferences of atmospheric quantities from simulations

TL;DR

This study investigates how the spatial resolution of 3D radiative MHD simulations affects the inference of atmospheric quantities from synthetic spectra, revealing that higher resolution captures finer details but also introduces systematic errors in inversions.

Contribution

It compares synthetic spectra from simulations at different resolutions and examines the impact on inferred atmospheric parameters and inversion accuracy, highlighting resolution-dependent effects.

Findings

Higher resolutions produce more detailed structures and extreme values.

Sub-resolution effects cause systematic errors in spectral inversions.

Diminishing returns observed with increasing sub-resolution effects.

Abstract

Small scale processes are thought to be important for the dynamics of the solar atmosphere. While numerical resolution fundamentally limits their inclusion in MHD simulations, real observations at the same nominal resolution should still contain imprints of sub-resolution effects. This means that the synthetic observables from a simulation of given resolution might not be directly comparable to real observables at the same resolution. It is thus of interest to investigate how inferences based on synthetic spectra from simulations with different numerical resolutions compare, and whether these differences persist after the spectra have been spatially degraded to a common resolution. We aim to compare synthetic spectra obtained from realistic 3D radiative magnetohydrodynamic (rMHD) simulations run at three different numerical resolutions from the same initial atmosphere, using very simple methods for inferring line-of-sight velocities and magnetic fields. Additionally we examine how the differing spatial resolution impacts the results retrieved from the STiC inversion code. We find that while the simple inferences for all three simulations reveal the same large-scale tendencies, the higher resolutions yield more fine-grained structures and more extreme line-of-sight velocities/magnetic fields in concentrated spots even after spatial smearing. We also see indications that the imprints of sub-resolution effects on the degraded spectra result in systematic errors in the inversions, and that these errors increase with the amount of sub-resolution effects included. Fortunately, however, we find that including successively more sub-resolution yields smaller additional effects; i.e. there is a clear trend of diminishing importance for progressively finer sub-resolution effects.