Seismology Research at NMSU

Inverted meridional circulation flows for GONG and HMI, as well as cuts through them.

In this paper we took our travel-time measurements from earlier work and tried to infer the deep, large-scale flows inside the Sun. To get some sense of our results using GONG ground-based data, we compared our results to those obtained from space-based data in Zhao et al. (2013).

We find some similarities between each group, notably a very unexpected shallow equatorward flow only 10% into the Sun. Such a feature had been expected to lie around 30% into the Sun. While the Stanford group finds some evidence of again a northward flow deeper down, our results do not indicate such a structure within the uncertainties.

While the similarities are encouraging, the paper shows that when taking into consideration mass conservation in the convection zone, both results have some important inconsistencies that require much more analysis and understanding.