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Ca II K spectroheliograms for studies of long-term changes in solar irradiance

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 نشر من قبل Theodosios Chatzistergos
 تاريخ النشر 2018
  مجال البحث فيزياء
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We address the importance of historical full disc Ca II K spectroheliograms for solar activity and irradiance reconstruction studies. We review our work on processing such data to enable them to be used in irradiance reconstructions. We also present our preliminary estimates of the plage areas from five of the longest available historical Ca II K archives.



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Reconstructions of past irradiance variations require suitable data on solar activity. The longest direct proxy is the sunspot number, and it has been most widely employed for this purpose. These data, however, only provide information on the surface magnetic field emerging in sunspots, while a suitable proxy of the evolution of the bright magnetic features, specifically faculae/plage and network, is missing. This information can potentially be extracted from the historical full-disc observations in the Ca II K line. We have analysed over 100,000 historical images from 8 digitised photographic archives of the Arcetri, Kodaikanal, McMath-Hulbert, Meudon, Mitaka, Mt Wilson, Schauinsland, and Wendelstein observatories, as well as one archive of modern observations from the Rome/PSPT. The analysed data cover the period 1893--2018. We first performed careful photometric calibration and compensation for the centre-to-limb variation, and then segmented the images to identify plage regions. This has been consistently applied to both historical and modern observations. The plage series derived from different archives are generally in good agreement with each other. However, there are also clear deviations that most likely hint at intrinsic differences in the data and their digitisation. We showed that accurate image processing significantly reduces errors in the plage area estimates. Accurate photometric calibration also allows precise plage identification on images from different archives without the need to arbitrarily adjust the segmentation parameters. Finally, by comparing the plage area series from the various records, we found the conversion laws between them. This allowed us to produce a preliminary composite of the plage areas obtained from all the datasets studied here. This is a first step towards an accurate assessment of the long-term variation of plage regions.
Knowledge of solar irradiance variability is critical to Earths climate models and understanding the solar influence on Earths climate. Direct solar irradiance measurements are only available since 1978. Reconstructions of past variability typically rely on sunspot data. These provide only indirect information on the facular and network regions, which are decisive contributors to irradiance variability on timescales of the solar cycle and longer. Our ultimate goal is to reconstruct past solar irradiance variations using historical full-disc Ca II K observations to describe the facular contribution independently of sunspot observations. Here, we develop the method and test it extensively by using modern CCD-based Ca II K observations and carry out initial tests on two photographic archives. We employ carefully reduced and calibrated Ca II K images from 13 datasets, such as those from the Meudon, Mt Wilson, and Rome observatories. We convert them to unsigned magnetograms and then use them as input to the adapted SATIRE model to reconstruct TSI variations over the period 1978-2019, for which direct irradiance measurements are available. The reconstructed TSI from the analysed Ca II K archives agrees well with direct TSI measurements and existing reconstructions. The model also returns good results on data taken with different bandpasses and images with low spatial resolution. Historical Ca II K archives suffer from numerous inconsistencies, but we show that these archives can still be used to reconstruct TSI with reasonable accuracy provided the observations are accurately processed. By using the unsigned magnetograms of the Sun reconstructed from high-quality Ca II K observations as input into the SATIRE model, we can reconstruct solar irradiance variations nearly as accurately as from directly recorded magnetograms.
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Historical Ca II K spectroheliograms (SHG) are unique in representing long-term variations of the solar chromospheric magnetic field. They usually suffer from numerous problems and lack photometric calibration. Thus accurate processing of these data is required to get meaningful results from their analysis. In this paper we aim at developing an automatic processing and photometric calibration method that provides precise and consistent results when applied to historical SHG. The proposed method is based on the assumption that the centre-to-limb variation of the intensity in quiet Sun regions does not vary with time. We tested the accuracy of the proposed method on various sets of synthetic images that mimic problems encountered in historical observations. We also tested our approach on a large sample of images randomly extracted from seven different SHG archives. The tests carried out on the synthetic data show that the maximum relative errors of the method are generally <6.5%, while the average error is <1%, even if rather poor quality observations are considered. In the absence of strong artefacts the method returns images that differ from the ideal ones by <2% in any pixel. The method gives consistent values for both plage and network areas. We also show that our method returns consistent results for images from different SHG archives. Our tests show that the proposed method is more accurate than other methods presented in the literature. Our method can also be applied to process images from photographic archives of solar observations at other wavelengths than Ca II K.
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