A modified peak-bagging technique for fitting low-l solar p-modes

We introduce a modified version of a standard power spectrum 'peak-bagging' technique which is designed to gain some of the advantages that fitting the entire low-degree p-mode power spectrum simultaneously would bring, but without the problems involved in fitting a model incorporating many hundreds of parameters. Employing Monte-Carlo simulations we show that by using this modified fitting code it is possible to determine the true background level in the vicinity of the p-mode peaks. In addition to this we show how small biases in other mode parameters, which are related to inaccurate estimates of the true background, are also consequently removed. (C) 2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.