Observations of large-scale solar flows

Abstract

In this dissertation, several components of large-scale solar flows are studied observationally: solar equatorial Rossby waves (waves of radial vorticity), large-scale convection, and surface flows around active regions. Maps of horizontal flows are derived from photospheric observations by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) aboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) using two different techniques: granulation tracking and local helioseismology. First, the eigenfunctions of solar Rossby waves are measured from helioseismic ring-diagram flow maps with a correlation method and a spectral analysis. Down to $9$ Mm below the surface, the dependence of the radial vorticity with radius $r$ is consistent with $r^{m-1}$, for a given longitudinal wavenumber $m$. At the surface, the eigenfunctions are complex-valued. The real part decreases away from the equator and switches sign around $\pm 20-30^\circ$. The imaginary part is small, but nonzero, and may be due to wave attenuation. This may have implications for the transport of angular momentum in the latitudinal direction. Second, we revisit previous measurements of power spectra of longitudinal velocities near the solar surface, obtained from time-distance and ring-diagram helioseismology. Several issues in these past helioseismic analyses are identified and corrected. The corrections are not sufficient to remove the discrepancy between the measurements. I thus present new velocity power spectra from granulation tracking and ring-diagram helioseismology. The two new measurements are close to each other near the solar surface, and the corresponding kinetic energy decreases with increasing spatial scale.