On the variability of the solar mean magnetic field: contributions from various magnetic features on the surface of the Sun

TL;DR

This study decomposes the solar disk into various magnetic features to determine their contributions to the solar mean magnetic field, finding that background magnetic regions are the primary source of the observed variability.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis showing that background magnetic regions dominate the variability of the solar mean magnetic field, clarifying the origin of the SMMF.

Findings

Background magnetic regions account for 89% of SMMF variation.

Active regions contribute only 11% to SMMF variability.

The SMMF closely correlates with background magnetic field changes.

Abstract

The solar mean magnetic field (SMMF) is referred to as the disc-averaged line-of-sight (LOS) magnetic field that also reflects the polarity imbalance of the magnetic field on the Sun. The origin of the SMMF has been debated over the past few decades, with one school of thought suggesting that the contribution to the SMMF is mostly due to the large scale magnetic field structure, also termed as the background magnetic field, whereas other and more recent studies have indicated that active regions have a major contribution to the observed SMMF. In this paper, we re-investigate the issue of the origin of the SMMF by decomposing the solar disk into plages, networks, sunspots and background regions, thereby calculating the variation in the observed SMMF due to each of these features. We have used full disk images from SDO/{\it AIA} recorded at 1600~\AA\, for earmarking plages, networks and background regions and 4500~\AA\, images for separating the sunspots. The LOS fields corresponding to each of these regions are estimated from the co-temporal SDO/{\it HMI} full disk magnetograms. The temporal variation of the SMMF shows a near one-to-one correspondence with that of the background field regions suggesting that they constitute the major component of the observed SMMF. A linear regression analysis based on the coefficient of determination shows that the background field dominates, and accounts for 89\% of the variation in the SMMF whereas the magnetic field from the other features accounts for the rest 11\%.