Issue |
A&A
Volume 640, August 2020
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A78 | |
Number of page(s) | 12 | |
Section | The Sun and the Heliosphere | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202037547 | |
Published online | 14 August 2020 |
Sunspot area catalog revisited: Daily cross-calibrated areas since 1874⋆
1
Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Justus-von-Liebig-Weg 3, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
e-mail: smandal.solar@gmail.com
2
School of Space Research, Kyung Hee University, Yongin, Gyeonggi 446-701, Republic of Korea
3
Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Koramangala, Bangalore 560034, India
4
Center of Excellence in Space Sciences India, IISER Kolkata, Mohanpur, 741246 West Bengal, India
5
Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences, Nainital, 263000 Uttarakhand, India
Received:
22
January
2020
Accepted:
28
April
2020
Context. Long and consistent sunspot area records are important for understanding long-term solar activity and variability. Multiple observatories around the globe have regularly recorded sunspot areas, but such individual records only cover restricted periods of time. Furthermore, there are systematic differences between these records and require cross-calibration before they can reliably be used for further studies.
Aims. We produce a cross-calibrated and homogeneous record of total daily sunspot areas, both projected and corrected, covering the period between 1874 and 2019. In addition, we generated a catalog of calibrated individual group areas for the same period.
Methods. We compared the data from nine archives: Royal Greenwich Observatory (RGO), Kislovodsk, Pulkovo, Debrecen, Kodaikanal, Solar Optical Observing Network (SOON), Rome, Catania, and Yunnan Observatories, covering the period between 1874 and 2019. Cross-comparisons of the individual records were done to produce homogeneous and inter-calibrated records of daily projected and corrected areas. As in earlier studies, the basis of the composite is formed by the data from RGO. After 1976, the only datasets used are those from Kislovodsk, Pulkovo, and Debrecen observatories. This choice was made based on the temporal coverage and the quality of the data. While there are still 776 days missing in the final composite, these remaining gaps could not be filled with data from the other archives as the missing days lie either before 1922 or after 2016 and none of the additional archives cover these periods.
Results. In contrast to the SOON data used in previous area composites for the post-RGO period, the properties of the data from Kislovodsk and Pulkovo are very similar to those from the RGO series. They also directly overlap the RGO data in time, which makes their cross-calibration with RGO much more reliable. Indeed, comparing our area catalog with previous such composites, we find improvements both in data quality and coverage. We also computed the daily Photometric Sunspot Index, which is widely used, for example, in empirical reconstructions of solar irradiance.
Key words: Sun: activity / sunspots / Sun: magnetic fields / Sun: photosphere
Generated composites are available at the CDS via anonymous ftp to cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (130.79.128.5) or via http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/A+A/640/A78 and at http://www2.mps.mpg.de/projects/sun-climate/data.html
© S. Mandal et al. 2020
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Open Access funding provided by Max Planck Society.
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