Solar Hαexcess during Solar Cycle 24 from full-disk filtergrams of the Chromospheric Telescope

Abstract

Context.The chromospheric Hαspectral line is a strong line in the spectrum of the Sun and other stars. In the stellar regime, this spectral line is already used as a powerful tracer of stellar activity. For the Sun, other tracers, such as Ca IIK, are typically used to monitor solar activity. Nonetheless, the Sun is observed constantly in Hαwith globally distributed ground-based full-disk imagers.Aims.The aim of this study is to introduce the imaging Hαexcess and deficit as tracers of solar activity and compare them to other established indicators. Furthermore, we investigate whether the active region coverage fraction or the changing Hαexcess in the active regions dominates temporal variability in solar Hαobservations.Methods.We used observations of full-disk Hαfiltergrams of the Chromospheric Telescope and morphological image processing techniques to extract the imaging Hαexcess and deficit, which were derived from the intensities above or below 10% of the median intensity in the filtergrams, respectively. These thresholds allowed us to filter for bright features (plage regions) and dark absorption features (filaments and sunspots). In addition, the thresholds were used to calculate the mean intensityImeanE/Dfor Hαexcess and deficit regions. We describe the evolution of the Hαexcess and deficit during Solar Cycle 24 and compare it to the mean intensity and other well established tracers: the relative sunspot number, the F10.7 cm radio flux, and the Mg IIindex. In particular, we tried to determine how constant the Hαexcess and number density of Hαexcess regions are between solar maximum and minimum. The number of pixels above or below the intensity thresholds were used to calculate the area coverage fraction of Hαexcess and deficit regions on the Sun, which was compared to the imaging Hαexcess and deficit and the respective mean intensities averaged for the length of one Carrington rotation. In addition, we present the Hαexcess and mean intensity variation of selected active regions during their disk passage in comparison to the number of pixels of Hαexcess regions.Results.The Hαexcess and deficit follow the behavior of the solar activity over the course of the cycle. They both peak around solar maximum, whereby the peak of the Hαdeficit is shortly after the solar maximum. Nonetheless, the correlation of the monthly averages of the Hαexcess and deficit is high with a Spearman correlation ofρ = 0.91. The Hαexcess is closely correlated to the chromospheric Mg IIindex with a correlation of 0.95. The highest correlation of the Hαdeficit is found with the F10.7 cm radio flux, with a correlation of 0.89, due to their peaks after the solar activity maximum. Furthermore, the Hαdeficit reflects the cyclic behavior of polar crown filaments and their disappearance shortly before the solar maximum. We investigated the mean intensity distribution for Hαexcess regions for solar minimum and maximum. The shape of the distributions for solar minimum and maximum is very similar, but with different amplitudes. Furthermore, we found that the area coverage fraction of Hαexcess regions and the Hαexcess are strongly correlated with an overall Spearman correlation of 0.92. The correlation between the Hαexcess and the mean intensity of Hαexcess regions is 0.75. The correlation of the area coverage fraction and the mean intensity of Hαexcess regions is in general relatively low (ρ = 0.45) and only for few active regions is this correlation above 0.7. The weak correlation between the area coverage fraction and mean intensity leaves us pessimistic that the degeneracy between these two quantities can be broken for the modeling of unresolved stellar surfaces.