Solar supergranular fractal dimension dependence on the Solar cycle phase

TL;DR

This study investigates how the fractal dimension of supergranular cells varies with the solar cycle, revealing an anticorrelation with solar activity levels using data from the Kodaikanal observatory.

Contribution

It provides the first analysis of supergranular fractal dimension dependence on the solar cycle phase based on a substantial dataset.

Findings

Fractal dimension is anticorrelated with solar activity.

Supergranular cells smaller than 20 Mm were predominantly analyzed.

The study highlights potential selection effects in the data.

Abstract

We study the complexity of the supergranular network through fractal dimension by using Ca II K digitized data archive obtained from Kodaikanal solar observatory. The data consists of 326 visually selected supergranular cells spread across the 23rd solar cycle. Only cells that were well-defined were chosen for the analysis and we discuss the potential selection effect thereof, mainly that it favors cells of a smaller size (< 20 Mm). Within this sample, we analyzed the fractal dimension of supergranules across the Solar cycle and find that it is anticorrelated with the activity level.