Study of the MHS equilibrium along the azimuthal direction for the whole sunspots. Top panels: Pearson’s correlation coefficient between the rhs and lhs of Eq. A.7 as a function of (r, z). Bottom panels: same as on the top but for the slope of the linear regression between the rhs and lhs of Eq. A.7 as a function of (r, z). R_s represents the radius of the sunspots. Solid black lines show the ϕ-average location of the τ_c = 1, 10⁻². Observational results are displayed on the left (GREGOR) and middle (Hinode) panels. Results from the MHD simulations are presented in the rightmost panels.