Convective motions on successively larger scales advect patterns created by convection on smaller scales this includes patterns of magnetic field, which thus have an approximately self-similar structure at scales larger than granulation. To a large extent, the apparent presence of distinct (meso- and supergranulation) scales is a result of the folding of this spectrum with the effective “filters” corresponding to various observational techniques.

Current supercomputer models match these constraints very closely, which lends credence to the models, and allows robust conclusions to be drawn from analysis of the model properties.Īt larger scales the properties of the convective velocity field at the solar surface are strongly influenced by constraints from mass conservation, with amplitudes of larger scale horizontal motions decreasing roughly in inverse proportion to the scale of the motion. The properties of convection at the main energy carrying (granular) scales are tightly constrained by observations, in particular by the detailed shapes of photospheric spectral lines and the topology (time- and length-scales, flow velocities, etc.) of the up- and downflows. We review the properties of solar convection that are directly observable at the solar surface, and discuss the relevant underlying physics, concentrating mostly on a range of depths from the temperature minimum down to about 20 Mm below the visible solar surface.

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