The Sun's Magnetic Power Spectra Over Two Solar Cycles. I. Calibration Between SDO/HMI And SOHO/MDI Magnetograms

TL;DR

This paper calibrates and compares magnetic power spectra from two solar observation instruments over two solar cycles, revealing a scale-dependent calibration factor and consistent spectral features related to supergranulation.

Contribution

It introduces a scale-dependent calibration method for magnetogram data from SOHO/MDI and SDO/HMI, enabling consistent spectral analysis across instruments.

Findings

Calibration factor varies with spatial scale l

Most spectra are consistent from 8 Mm to global scales

Spectral peaks at l≈120 related to supergranulation

Abstract

The Sun's magnetic field is strongly structured over a broad range of scales. The magnetic spatial power spectral analysis provides a powerful tool to understand the various scales of magnetic fields and their interaction with plasma motion. We aim to investigate the power spectra using spherical harmonic decomposition of high-resolution SOHO/MDI and SDO/HMI synoptic magnetograms covering three consecutive solar cycle minima in a series of papers. As the first of the series, we calibrate and analyze the power spectra based on co-temporal SDO/HMI and SOHO/MDI data in this paper. For the first time, we find that the calibration factor $r$ between SOHO/MDI and SDO/HMI varies with the spatial scale $l$ of the magnetic field, where $l$ is the degree of a spherical harmonics. The calibration factor satisfies $r(l)=\sqrt{-0.021 l^{0.64}+2} \quad(5<\mathrm{l}\leq539)$. With the calibration function, most contemporaneous SOHO/MDI and SDO/HMI magnetograms show consistent power spectra from about 8 Mm to the global scales over about 3 orders of magnitudes. Moreover, magnetic power spectra from SOHO/MDI and SDO/HMI maps show peaks/knees at $l\approx120$ corresponding to the typical supergranular scale (about 35 Mm) constrained from direct velocimetric measurements. This study paves the way for investigating the solar-cycle dependence of supergranulation and magnetic power spectra in subsequent studies.