Characteristic size scale of Supergranulation
Lead Investigator:
John G. Beck
Team Members:
Roger K. Ulrich
Frank Hill
Technical Summary:
The size scale of supergranulation has been given as about 30 Mm (Simon
and Leighton, 1964) suggesting a possible convective driving mechanism for
supergranulation stemming from the Helium ionization region. Alternatively,
an inverse cascade of energy from granulation size scale to the supergranulation
size scale has been proposed to explain this phenomenon. The spectrum of
supergranule sizes predicted by an inverse cascade process differs from
that predicted by deep convective motions. Using high resolution data from
SOI we propose to study the spatial spectrum of supergranules to determine
support for these two models.
Complete text of proposal.