Phase Shifts Measured in Evanescent Acoustic Waves above the Solar Photosphere and Their Possible Impacts on Local Helioseismology

A set of 464 minutes of high-resolution high-cadence observations were acquired for a region near the Sun’s disk center using the Interferometric BI-dimensional Spectrometer installed at the Dunn Solar Telescope. Ten sets of Dopplergrams are derived from the bisector of the spectral line corresponding approximately to different atmospheric heights, and two sets of Dopplergrams are derived using an MDI-like algorithm and center-of-gravity method. These data are then filtered to keep only acoustic modes, and phase shifts are calculated between Doppler velocities of different atmospheric heights as a function of acoustic frequency. The analysis of the frequency- and height-dependent phase shifts shows that, for evanescent acoustic waves, oscillations in the higher atmosphere lead those in the lower atmosphere by an order of 1 s when their frequencies are below about 3.0 mHz, and lags behind by about 1 s when their frequencies are above 3.0 mHz. Nonnegligible phase shifts are also found in areas with systematic upward or downward flows. All these frequency-dependent phase shifts cannot be explained by vertical flows or convective blueshifts, but are likely due to complicated hydrodynamics and radiative transfer in the nonadiabatic atmosphere in and above the photosphere. These phase shifts in the evanescent waves pose great challenges to the interpretation of some local helioseismic measurements that involve data acquired at different atmospheric heights or in regions with systematic vertical flows. More quantitative characterization of these phase shifts is needed so that they can either be removed during measuring processes or be accounted for in helioseismic inversions.