1D Solar Models in IDL: Spruit's Convection Model

The semi-empirical models of the solar atmosphere rely on the observed intensities and, therefore, they cannot say much about the invisible convection zone below the surface. Spruit (1974SoPh...34..277S) constructed a 1D model of the solar convection zone using the mixing-length theory with 4 free parameters. The model is constructed so that it matches the HSRA model (Gingerich et al, 1971SoPh...18..347G) of the solar atmosphere. The model of Spruit is sometimes used to initiate the convection simulations with 3D numerical codes.

Fig 1. The HSRA model atmosphere (dashed) and Spruit's model of convective zone (solid). This is reproduced after Fig.3 of Spruit's paper.

Fig 2. Same as Fig1, just the entire models are shown.

The data in the files below is Table II of Spruit's paper scanned, OCR-ed and manually double checked. I did some small changes to match the format of other models. The geometrical height scale is in km with zero at $tau_{500}=1$. All values are negative because this model covers only the layers below the surface. The variables in the original table are (the names in parentheses refer to the variable names in my files):

• depth relative to $tau_{500}=1$ (h),
• column mass (m),
• gas pressure (pgas),
• temperature (t),
• electron pressure (pel),
• density (rho),
• specific heat per mass (cp), 
• adiabatic gradient (agrad),
• mean molecular weight (mu),
• Rosseland mean opacity (kappa),
• radiative gradient (rgrad),
• mean gradient (mgrad),
• convective velocity (v),
• electrical conductivity (s33).

There are two versions: .dat (ascii) and .sav (IDL). In the IDL files the model is stored in a structure variable called spruit with the following tags:

spruit = {h:h, m:m, pgas:pgas, pel:pel, t:t, rho:rho, cp:cp, agrad:agrad, 
       mgrad:mgrad, rgrad:rgrad, mu_mu, kappa:kappa, v:v, s33:s33, 
       variables:variables, reference:reference}

where the variables tag has two self-explanatory tags, varnames and varunits. All units are in CGS, except depth that is in km. Both files are all in a tarball:

spruit.tar

Disclaimer: This data is publicly available in Spruit (1974, 1974SoPh...34..277S). If you use the data in a publication please cite it appropriately. I double-checked that the digitized version here matches the original, still typos are possible no matter how unlikely. If you have any doubts, compare the numbers to those in the paper.