High degree modes & instrumental effects

Abstract

Full-disk observations taken with the Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) on board the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft, or the upgraded Global Oscillations Network Group (GONG) instruments, have enough spatial resolution to resolve modes up to ι = 1000 if not ι = 1500. The inclusion of such high-degree modes (i.e., ι ≤ 1000) improves dramatically inferences near the surface. Unfortunately, observational and instrumental effects cause the characterization of high degree modes to be quite complicated.Indeed, the characteristics of the solar acoustic spectrum are such that, for a given order, mode lifetimes get shorter and spatial leaks get closer in frequency as the degree of a mode increases. A direct consequence of this property is that individual modes are resolved only at low and intermediate degrees. At high degrees the individual modes blend into ridges and the power distribution of the ridge defines the ridge central frequency, masking the underlying mode frequency. An accurate model of the amplitude of the peaks that contribute to the ridge power distribution is needed to recover the underlying mode frequency from fitting the ridge.We present a detailed discussion of the modeling of the ridge power distribution, and the contribution of the various observational and instrumental effects on the spatial leakage, in the context of the MDI instrument. We have constructed a physically motivated model (rather than an ad hoc correction scheme) that results in a methodology that can produce unbiased estimates of high-degree modes. This requires that the instrumental characteristics are well understood, a task that has turned out to pose a major challenge.We also present our latest results, where most of the known instrumental and observational effects that affect specifically high-degree modes were removed. These new results allow us to focus our attention on changes with solar activity.Finally, we present variations of mode frequencies resulting from solar activity over most of solar cycle 23. We present the correlation of medium and high degree modes with different solar indices. Our results confirm that the frequency shift scaled by the relative mode inertia is a function of frequency alone and follows a simple power law.