ICATE   21876
INSTITUTO DE CIENCIAS ASTRONOMICAS, DE LA TIERRA Y DEL ESPACIO
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
artículos
Título:
Solar Cycle Propagation, Memory, and Prediction: Insights from a Century of Magnetic Proxies
Autor/es:
MUÑOZ-JARAMILLO, ANDRES; DASI-ESPUIG, MARIA; BALMACEDA, L. A. ;; DELUCA, EDWARD
Revista:
Astrophysical Journal Letters
Editorial:
IOPScience
Referencias:
Año: 2013 vol. 767 p. 1 - 7
ISSN:
2041-8205
Resumen:
The solar cycle and its associated magnetic activity are the main drivers behind changes in the interplanetary
environment and Earths upper atmosphere (commonly referred to as space weather). These changes have a direct
impact on the lifetime of space-based assets and can create hazards to astronauts in space. In recent years there
has been an effort to develop accurate solar cycle predictions (with aims at predicting the long-term evolution of
space weather), leading to nearly a hundred widely spread predictions for the amplitude of solar cycle 24. A major
contributor to the disagreement is the lack of direct long-term databases covering different components of the solar
magnetic field (toroidal versus poloidal). Here, we use sunspot area and polar faculae measurements spanning a full
century (as our toroidal and poloidal field proxies) to study solar cycle propagation, memory, and prediction. Our
results substantiate predictions based on the polar magnetic fields, whereas we find sunspot area to be uncorrelated
with cycle amplitude unless multiplied by area-weighted average tilt. This suggests that the joint assimilation of
tilt and sunspot area is a better choice (with aims to cycle prediction) than sunspot area alone, and adds to the
evidence in favor of active region emergence and decay as the main mechanism of poloidal field generation (i.e.,
the BabcockLeighton mechanism). Finally, by looking at the correlation between our poloidal and toroidal proxies
across multiple cycles, we find solar cycle memory to be limited to only one cycle.