The role of f modes in the inversion of high-ℓ rotational splittings

The contribution of the solar f modes of oscillation to the inversion of high-degree rotational splitting data is examined. We find that the f modes play an important role in such inversions as revealed by the magnitude of their weighting coefficients ci. This may be attributed to the single-peaked structure of the f-mode kernels, which is similar to that of the desired averaging kernels and in contrast to the many-peaked shape of the higher-order kernels. The high weight placed on the f modes in the inversions raises issues for observational techniques since the f modes possess modest power levels and their detection is influenced by the choice of spatial filtering.