The butterfly diagram internal structure

Abstract

This work originates from the need of getting a picture of the spot zone that is sharp enough to efficiently help us place tighter and more realistic constraints than we would usually do on dynamo models, in order to improve their predictive performance.

This paper questions the confidence in Maunder’s Butterfly Diagram (BD) as the fundamental tool for describing the magnetic flux large-scale distribution and presents a new version of the time-latitude diagram for cycles 21 through 23, where spot groups are given proportional relevance to their area. The diagram presented here confirms the active regions’ well-known tendency to repeatedly appear in a few photospheric regions (“activity nests”) tightly limited in latitude, active for a short time. Activity nests leave their signature in the BD, in the form of small portions (“knots”) characterized by the spotted area high density. The BD may be described as a cluster of knots. A knot may appear at either lower or higher latitudes than previous ones; accordingly, the spot mean latitude abruptly drifts equatorward or even poleward, even though the knot’s prevalent tendency is to appear at lower and lower latitudes.

A careful inspection of the BD suggests that its intricate fine structure may be (partially) disentangled by recognizing that, in any hemisphere, the activity is split into two or more distinct “activity waves” (out of phase compared to each other), drifting equatorward at a rate higher than the spot zone as a whole. Preliminary computations confirm this suggestion.