The outer surface layers of the sun show a clear deceleration at low latitudes. This is generally thought to be the result of a strong dominance of vertical turbulent motions associated with strong downdrafts. This strong negative radial shear should not only contribute to amplifying the toroidal field locally and to expelling magnetic helicity, but it may also be responsible for producing a st...

We have discovered small whirlpools in the Sun, with a size similar to the terrestrial hurricanes (. 0.5 Mm). The theory of solar convection predicts them, but they had remained elusive so far. The vortex flows are created at the downdrafts where the plasma returns to the solar interior after cooling down, and we detect them because some magnetic bright points (BPs) follow a logarithmic spiral ...

The implications of flight-level instrument wetting error removal upon the mean thermodynamic structure across the eyewall, buoyancy of rainband vertical motions, and vertical energy fluxes near the top of the inflow layer are studied. Thermodynamic quantities across the mean eyewall are found to increase at all levels. As a result, maximum radial gradients of each quantity are shifted from the...

This presentation is a summary of research progress supported under the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) project entitled "Parameterization of Convective Clouds, Mesoscale Convective Systems, and Con'o'ective-Generated Clouds." The approach used in this research is to perform explicit simulations of convective clouds and mesoscale convective systems for well-documented observed cases. Th...