Solar Large Scale Convective Flows Database

The existence of giant cells (and first use of the name) was proposed by George Simon and Nigel Weiss in 1968.They suggested that, in addition to granules and supergranules, there should large cells that span the convection zone and have horizontal dimensions many times larger than supergranules. Over the ensueing 45 years there were several observations that hinted at the existence of giant cells but none of these studies gave any information on the detailed structure or dynamics of the cells. There were also many theoretical studies, many with detailed numerical simulations, showing what the giant cells might look like and how they might behave.