Improved methods of predicting stellar atmospheres from known atmospheres in the presence of convection

While the temperature-scaling technique for predicting stellar atmospheric models on the basis of a given model offers advantages of simplicity and small errors in the outer radiative zone, the method yields large errors in convection zones by comparison with line-blanketed models that are calculated with the local mixing-length theory of convection. Attention is presently given to two alternatives to temperature scaling which predict model atmospheres on the basis of predetermined corrections to the diffusion approximation or the gray approximation. Diffusion prediction yields the same, and gray prediction nearly the same, results as temperature scaling in the outer radiative zone, while respectively giving better and best results in the convection zone. The gray method can be generalized to predict stellar atmospheres with nonlocal convection.