Large-scale Vortices in the Solar Photosphere: Statistical Properties and the Reliability of Local Correlation Tracking
Abstract
Vortices are observed throughout the solar atmosphere, spanning a wide range of spatial scales. Although small-scale vortices have been studied extensively, mesoscale vortices remain less explored, and it is still unclear whether they can be reliably recovered from observations. Mesogranular-scale motions are recovered from the R2D2 simulations by applying Gaussian spatial smoothing to the horizontal velocity field with full width at half maximum (FWHM) values of 2.5-4.0 Mm. To evaluate the accuracy of local correlation tracking (LCT) and its suitability for identifying mesogranular vortices, we apply LCT to synthetic intensity maps at τ= 1 using the same spatial windows and temporal averaging windows of 10-60 minutes. Vortices are identified in both the reference and LCT-derived velocity fields using the Γ method. For all tested parameter combinations, LCT underestimates the number of mesogranular-scale vortices. The best overall recovery is obtained for relatively small spatial smoothing scales (FWHM ≤ 3.5 Mm) and short averaging windows (≤ 20 minutes), which provide the most reliable vorticity and lifetime statistics while maintaining strong agreement in vortex radius and area distributions. Our analysis shows that only a modest fraction of LCT-detected vortices correspond to vortices identified in the reference velocity field (3.54%-17.88%), depending on FWHM and temporal averaging. This indicates that vortex-driven dynamics inferred from LCT-detected vortices should be interpreted with caution. Our results suggest that applying the Γ method to LCT-derived velocity fields can recover useful statistical properties of mesoscale vortical structures, especially their temporal trends and characteristic sizes.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{aldhafeeri2026largescale,
title = {{Large-scale Vortices in the Solar Photosphere: Statistical Properties and the Reliability of Local Correlation Tracking}},
author = {Mashael Aldhafeeri and Suzana S. A. Silva and Istvan Ballai and Gary Verth and Haruhisa Iijima and Hideyuki Hotta and Viktor Fedun},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.27222},
eprint = {2610.27222},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27222},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Large-scale Vortices in the Solar Photosphere: Statistical Properties and the Reliability of Local Correlation Tracking
AU - Mashael Aldhafeeri
AU - Suzana S. A. Silva
AU - Istvan Ballai
AU - Gary Verth
AU - Haruhisa Iijima
AU - Hideyuki Hotta
AU - Viktor Fedun
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/19
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.27222
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27222
AB - Vortices are observed throughout the solar atmosphere, spanning a wide range of spatial scales. Although small-scale vortices have been studied extensively, mesoscale vortices remain less explored, and it is still unclear whether they can be reliably recovered from observations. Mesogranular-scale motions are recovered from the R2D2 simulations by applying Gaussian spatial smoothing to the horizontal velocity field with full width at half maximum (FWHM) values of 2.5-4.0 Mm. To evaluate the accuracy of local correlation tracking (LCT) and its suitability for identifying mesogranular vortices, we apply LCT to synthetic intensity maps at τ= 1 using the same spatial windows and temporal averaging windows of 10-60 minutes. Vortices are identified in both the reference and LCT-derived velocity fields using the Γ method. For all tested parameter combinations, LCT underestimates the number of mesogranular-scale vortices. The best overall recovery is obtained for relatively small spatial smoothing scales (FWHM ≤ 3.5 Mm) and short averaging windows (≤ 20 minutes), which provide the most reliable vorticity and lifetime statistics while maintaining strong agreement in vortex radius and area distributions. Our analysis shows that only a modest fraction of LCT-detected vortices correspond to vortices identified in the reference velocity field (3.54%-17.88%), depending on FWHM and temporal averaging. This indicates that vortex-driven dynamics inferred from LCT-detected vortices should be interpreted with caution. Our results suggest that applying the Γ method to LCT-derived velocity fields can recover useful statistical properties of mesoscale vortical structures, especially their temporal trends and characteristic sizes.
ER -