The computationally demanding nature of radiative-hydrodynamical simulations
of stellar surface convection warrants an investigation of the sensitivity of
the convective structure and spectral synthesis to the numerical resolution and
dimension of the simulations, which is presented here. With too coarse a
resolution the predicted spectral lines tend to be too narrow, reflecting
insufficient Doppler broadening from the convective motions, while at the
currently highest affordable resolution the line shapes have converged
essentially perfectly to the observed profiles. Similar conclusions are drawn
from the line asymmetries and shifts. In terms of abundances, weak FeI and FeII
lines show a very small dependence (~0.02 dex) while for intermediate strong
lines with significant non-thermal broadening the sensitivity increases (~0.10
dex). Problems arise when using 2D convection simulations to describe an
inherent 3D phenomenon, which translates to inaccurate atmospheric velocity
fields and temperature and pressure structures. In 2D the theoretical line
profiles tend to be too shallow and broad compared with the 3D calculations and
observations, in particular for intermediate strong lines. In terms of
abundances, the 2D results are systematically about 0.1 dex lower than for the
3D case for FeI lines. Furthermore, the predicted line asymmetries and shifts
are much inferior in 2D. Given these shortcomings and computing time
considerations it is better to use 3D simulations of even modest resolution
than high-resolution 2D simulations.Comment: Accepted for A&
