Helioseismological determination of the subsurface spatial spectrum of solar convection: Demonstration using numerical simulations

Context. Understanding convection is important in stellar physics, for example, when it is an input in stellar evolution models. Helioseismic estimates of convective flow amplitudes in deeper regions of the solar interior disagree by orders of magnitude among themselves and with simulations. Aims. We aim to assess the validity of an existing upper limit of solar convective flow amplitudes at a depth of 0.96 solar radii obtained using time-distance helioseismology and several simplifying assumptions. Methods. We generated synthetic observations for convective flow fields from a magnetohydrodynamic simulation (MURaM) using travel-time sensitivity functions and a noise model. We compared the estimates of the flow amplitude with the actual value of the flow. Results. For the scales of interest ( ℓ