The structure and evolution of boundary layers in stratified convection

Solar convection is highly stratified, and the density in the Sun increases by many orders of magnitude from the photosphere to the base of the convection zone. The photosphere is an important boundary layer, and interactions between the surface convection and deep convection may lie at the root of the solar convection conundrum, where observed large-scale velocities are much lower than predicted by full numerical simulations. Here, we study the structure and time evolution of boundary layers in numerical stratified convection. We study fully compressible convection within plane-parallel layers using the Dedalus pseudospectral framework. Within the context of polytropic stratification, we study flows from low (1e-3) to moderately high (0.1) Mach number, and at moderate to high Rayleigh number to study both laminar and turbulent convective transport. We aim to characterize the thickness and time variation of velocity and thermal (entropy) boundary layers at the top and bottom boundaries of the domain.