Solar Cycle Evolution of Filaments over a Century: Investigations with the Meudon and McIntosh Hand-drawn Archives

TL;DR

This study digitizes and analyzes a century-long record of solar filaments from hand-drawn archives, revealing their evolution over solar cycles and their relation to magnetic field dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces an automated calibration and identification method for long-term filament data, creating a continuous, multi-cycle database for solar magnetic field studies.

Findings

Filament properties cycle with the 11-year sunspot cycle.

Filament tilt angles suggest origins in large-scale magnetic fields.

The filament database enables long-term solar magnetic field modeling.

Abstract

Hand-drawn synoptic maps from the Meudon Observatory (1919 onwards) and the McIntosh archive (1967 onwards) are two important sources of long-term, manually recorded filament observations. In this study, we calibrate the Meudon maps and subsequently identify filaments through an automated method. We extract physical parameters from this filament database and perform a comparative study of their long-term evolution focusing on the cotemporal period of McIntosh and Meudon observations. The spatio-temporal evolution of filaments manifests in the form of a filament butterfly diagram, indicating further that they are intimately related to the large-scale solar cycle. Physical descriptors such as the number and length of filaments, which are tracers of solar surface magnetic field, have cycles which are phase-locked with the 11 year sunspot cycle. The tilt angle distribution of filaments - both near or distant from active region locations - indicates that their origin is due to either large-scale surface magnetic field or inter-active region field evolution. This study paves the way for constructing a composite series of hand-drawn filament data with minimal gaps stretching the time span of solar filament observations to a century. On the one hand, this would serve as useful constraints for models of magnetic field emergence and evolution on the Sun's surface over multiple solar cycles, and on the other hand, this filament database may be used to guide the reconstruction of filament-prominence associated eruptive events before the space age