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SOLAR ACTIVITY AND LATITUDINAL DISTRIBUTION OF SUNSPOTS

  • Chang, Heon-Young (Department of Astronomy and Atmospheric Sciences, Kyungpook National University)
  • Received : 2022.05.12
  • Accepted : 2022.08.17
  • Published : 2022.10.31

Abstract

We explore the latitudinal distribution of sunspots and pursue to establish a correlation between the statistical parameters of the latitudinal distribution of sunspots and characteristics of solar activity. For this purpose, we have statistically analyzed the daily sunspot areas and latitudes observed from May in 1874 to September in 2016. As results, we confirm that the maximum of the monthly averaged International Sunspot Number (ISN) strongly correlates with the mean number of sunspots per day, while the maximum ISN strongly anti-correlates with the number of spotless days. We find that both the maximum ISN and the mean number of sunspots per day strongly correlate with the the average latitude, the standard deviation, the skewness of the the latitudinal distribution of sunspots, while they appears to marginally correlate with the kurtosis. It is also found that the northern and southern hemispheres seem to show a correlated behavior in a different way when sunspots appearing in the northern and southern hemispheres are examined separately.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

The author thanks the anonymous referees for critical comments and helpful suggestions which greatly improve the original version of the manuscript. This study was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean government (NRF-2018R1D1A3B070421880) and Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Korea funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (No. 2018R1A6A1A06024970).

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