NGTS Observations of Enhanced Nanoflare Activity in Fully Convective Stars Linked to Plasma Resistivity

Previous examination of fully-convective M-dwarf stars highlighted unexplained enhanced rates of nanoflare activity. A potential explanation was linked to the helical turbulence dynamo which operates in fully convective stars. However, recent studies have found this helical dynamo does not appear significantly different to the Solar dynamo. The specific role the convective boundary plays on observed nanoflare rates, until now, was not known. Here we find evidence that fully convective M2.5V (and later) stars display greatly enhanced nanoflare rates compared with their pre-convective boundary counterparts. Importantly, the rate of nanoflare activity increases with increasing spectral sub-type, with nanoflares exhibiting greatly enhanced flaring rates via Sweet-Parker reconnection. This occurs more favourably at increased plasma resistivities experienced in these later MV stars, suggesting a direct interplay between the rate of nanoflare occurrence and the intrinsic plasma parameters. As such, nanoflare behaviour is likely to be unrelated to the behaviour of the local dynamo.

How Does Cyclogenesis Commence Given a Favorable Tropical Environment?

In a series of collaborative Russian–American works (Levina and Montgomery, 2009–2015), we applied the fundamental ideas of self-organization in turbulence with broken mirror symmetry, the so-called “helical” turbulence. In this context, tropical cyclogenesis is considered as a threshold extreme event in the three-dimensional helical moist convective atmospheric turbulence of a vorticity-rich environment of a pre-depression zone. This allowed us to discover a large-scale vortex instability and answer the question “When will cyclogenesis commence given a favorable tropical environment?”. The new instability emerges against the background of seemingly disorganized convection, without a well-defined center of near-surface circulation and noticeably precedes the formation of a tropical depression. This can give the fundamental ground and quantitative substantiation for the term “Potential Tropical Cyclone” as a beginning of TC genesis. In the present work, we explore in detail the crucial role of special convective coherent structures of cloud scales—vortical hot towers (VHTs)—in the formation and maintenance of the secondary circulation and, therefore, of the whole mesoscale vortex system. On this basis, we propose how the onset of large-scale instability, i.e., the beginning of TC genesis, can be diagnosed exactly and distantly with VHTs patterns in the field of temperature (satellite data) and vertical helicity (cloud-resolving numerical analysis). The present research is intended to contribute to a recently initiated development of operational diagnosis of the beginning of TC genesis based on GOES Imagery and supported by cloud-resolving numerical modeling.