Chinese Sunspot Drawings and Their Digitization—(Ⅶ) Sunspot Penumbra to Umbra Area Ratio Using the Hand-Drawing Records from Yunnan Observatories

The ratio of penumbral to umbra area of sunspots plays a crucial role in the solar physics fields, especially for understanding the origin and evolution of the solar activity cycle. By analyzing the recently digitized sunspot drawings observed from Yunnan Observatories(1957–2021), we investigate the long-term variation of the penumbral to umbra area ratio of sunspots. An automatic extraction method, based on the maximum between-class variance and the morphological discrimination, is used to accurately extract penumbra and umbra and to calculate the ratio over six solar cycles(cycle 19–24). The expected value of the ratio of penumbra to umbra area is found to be 6.63 ± 0.98, and it does not exhibit any systematic variation with sunspot latitudes and phases. The average ratio fluctuates from 5 to 7.5 per year and the overall trend has decreased after 1999 compared to the previous one.The ratio of sunspot penumbra to umbra area satisfies the log-normal distribution, implying that its variation is related to the evolution of the photospheric magnetic field. Our results are consistent with previous works.

Chinese sunspot drawings and their digitization–(Ⅱ)accuracy analysis for digitized sunspot hand-drawing records of Yunnan Observatories

Sunspots are the most striking and easily observed magnetic structures of the Sun,and statistical analysis of solar historical data could reveal a wealth of information on the long-term variation of solar activity cycle.The hand-drawn sunspot records of Yunnan Observatories,Chinese Academy of Sciences have been accumulating for more than 60 years,and nearly 16000 images have been preserved.In the future,the observation mode of recording sunspots by hand-drawing will be replaced inevitably by digital images observed either at ground or in space.To connect the hand-drawn sunspot data and the purely digital sunspot data in future,it is necessary to analyze the systematic errors of the data which are observed by the two observation modes in the period of transition.In this paper,we choose 268 round sunspots(Htype in modified Zurich sunspot classification)from the drawing of Yunnan Observatories to compare their positions and areas with the CCD observations made by Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager(HMI)on board Solar Dynamic Observatory(SDO)and Global Oscillation Network Group(GONG).We find that the latitude and longitude accuracy of hand-drawn sunspot are within-0.127 and 2.29 degree respectively,and the area accuracy is about 16.36 sunspot unit(μHem).Systematic errors apparently decrease with large sunspot.