---
author:
- 'Vincent G. A. Böning'
- 'Aaron C. Birch'
- Laurent Gizon
- 'Thomas L. Duvall, Jr.'
- Jesper Schou
date: 'Received 17 December 2019; Accepted 5 February 2020'
title: '[Characterizing the spatial pattern of solar supergranulation using the bispectrum]{}'
---

[The spatial power spectrum of supergranulation does not fully characterize the underlying physics of turbulent convection. For example, it does not describe the [[non-Gaussianity]{}]{} in the horizontal flow divergence.]{} [Our aim is to statistically characterize the spatial pattern of solar supergranulation beyond the power spectrum. [The next-order statistic is the bispectrum. It measures correlations of three Fourier components and is related to the nonlinearities in the underlying physics. It also characterizes how a skewness in the dataset is generated by the coupling of three Fourier components.]{} ]{} [We estimated the bispectrum of supergranular horizontal surface divergence maps that were obtained using local correlation tracking (LCT) and time-distance helioseismology (TD) from one year of data from the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager on-board the Solar Dynamics Observatory starting in May 2010.]{} [We find significantly nonzero and consistent estimates for the bispectrum using LCT and TD. The strongest nonlinearity is present when the three coupling wave vectors are at the 