Realistic Simulation of Local Solar Supergranulation

I represent results three-dimensional numerical simulation of solar surface convection on scales local supergranulation with realistic model physics. I study thermal structure of convective motions in photosphere, the range of convection cell sizes and the penetration depths of convection. A portion of the solar photosphere extending 100 x 100 Mm horizontally and from 0 Mm down to 20 Mm below the visible surface is considered. I take equation of state and opacities of stellar matter and distribution with radius of all physical variables from Solar Standard Model. The equations of fully compressible radiation hydrodynamics with dynamical viscosity and gravity are solved. The high order conservative PPML difference scheme for the hydrodynamics, the method of characteristic for the radiative transfer and dynamical viscosity from subgrid scale modeling are applied. The simulations are conducted on a uniform horizontal grid of 1000 x 1000, with 168 nonuniformly spaced vertical grid points, on 256 processors with distributed memory multiprocessors on supercomputer MVS5000 in Computational Centre of Russian Academy of Sciences.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. To appear in AIP Conference Proceedings, "Exploring the Solar System and the Universe", Apr 8-12 2008, Bucharest, Romania, eds. Vasile Mioc, Cristiana Dumitrache & Nedelia A. Popesc

Assessment of the religious-tourism potential in Romania

This paper aims to provide a model for the assessment of the religious-tourism potential in Romania. The religious practice has been in a continuous change over the past 20 years, making the pilgrimage phenomenon to have an upward trend. In the same time, many religious edifices are becoming more attractive to visitors, as they are included in package tours, and visited by large numbers of tourists. In Romania, there are many religious places visited both, by tourists or pilgrims; it is difficult to assess their numbers and also to distinguish between religious practices and touristic visits as no studies have been conducted in this direction. They are centres of religious (spiritual) power, in which people regularly spend money and time while around them it has been developed a real infrastructure, from roads or construction of facilities to more complex services that include accommodation, stores or commercial stalls, selling souvenirs or items more or less related to religious practice. Therefore, the objectives of this paper aimed at evaluating the tourist valences of religious edifices in Romania as well as the degree of their valorisation; in order to meet these objectives, three dimensions were considered and assessed: the historical-cultural dimension, the religious dimension, and the economic dimension. Many relevant elements for these dimensions have been quantified, giving them scores based on unitary criteria. The results help to see better the differentiation/association between the tourist value and the religious value of religious edifices in Romania, highlighting particularities at the national level, which will be the subject of further analysis