Realistic magnetohydrodynamical simulation of solar local supergranulation

Abstract

Three-dimensional numerical simulations of solar surface magnetoconvection using realistic model physics are conducted. The thermal structure of convective motions into the upper radiative layers of the photosphere, the main scales of convective cells and the penetration depths of convection are investigated. We take part of the solar photosphere with a size of 60×60 Mm2 in the horizontal direction and of depth 20 Mm from the level of the visible solar surface. We use a realistic initial model of the sun and apply the equation of state and opacities of stellar matter. The equations of fully compressible radiation magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) with dynamical viscosity and gravity are solved. We apply (i) the conservative total variation diminishing (TVD) difference scheme for MHD, (ii) the diffusion approximation for radiative transfer and (iii) dynamical viscosity from subgrid-scale modeling. In simulation, we take a uniform two-dimensional grid in the horizontal plane and a nonuniform grid in the vertical direction with the number of cells being 600×600×204. We use 512 processors with distributed memory multiprocessors on the supercomputer MVS-100k at the Joint Computational Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences.