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Spot cycle reconstruction: an empirical tool. Application to the sunspot cycle

A. R. G. Santos, M. S. Cunha, P. P. Avelino, T. L. Campante

Abstract
Context. The increasing interest in understanding stellar magnetic activity cycles is a strong motivation for the development of parameterized starspot models which can be constrained observationally.
Aims.
In this work we develop an empirical tool for the stochastic reconstruction of sunspot cycles, using the average solar properties as a reference.
Methods.
The synthetic sunspot cycle is compared with the sunspot data extracted from the National Geophysical Data Center, in particular using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. This tool yields synthetic spot group records, including date, area, latitude, longitude, rotation rate of the solar surface at the group’s latitude, and an identification number.
Results.
Comparison of the stochastic reconstructions with the daily sunspot records confirms that our empirical model is able to successfully reproduce the main properties of the solar sunspot cycle. As a by-product of this work, we show that the Gnevyshev-Waldmeier rule, which describes the spots’ area-lifetime relation, is not adequate for small groups and we propose an effective correction to that relation which leads to a closer agreement between the synthetic sunspot cycle and the observations.

Keywords
Sun: activity, Sun: oscillations, stars: activity, stars: oscillations, sunspots, starspots

Astronomy & Astrophysics
Volume 580, Number of pages A62
2015 August

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Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa Universidade do Porto Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia COMPETE 2020 PORTUGAL 2020 União Europeia