A Modern Reconstruction of Richard Carrington’s Observations (1853–1861)

Bhattacharya, Sharmila; Teague, E. T. H.; Fay, Susanne; Lefèvre, Laure; Jansen, Maarten; Clette, Frédéric

doi:10.1007/s11207-021-01864-8

Cited by 10 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Over the period 1853-1861, Carrington routinely and carefully determined the heliographic coordinates of sunspots (Carrington 1863;Cliver & Keer 2012;Bhattacharya et al 2021) by projecting an image of the solar disk onto a coated glass plate (Carrington 1859, p. 13;Carrington 1863, Plate I). Carrington's original sunspot drawings, both whole disk and enlargements of spot groups (Hayakawa et al 2018), are preserved in the archives of the Royal Astronomical Society (see Data Availability).…”

Section: Source Records and Area Measurementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recent archival investigations have located Carrington's original manuscripts, not only of his close-up flare sketches but also of his whole-disk drawings (Hayakawa et al 2018(Hayakawa et al , 2019Bhattacharya et al 2021). Moreover, recent studies have developed statistical analyses of WL flare events (Kretzschmar 2011; Namekata et al 2017;Watanabe et al 2017;CDK20).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Magnitude Estimates for the Carrington Flare in 1859 September: As Seen from the Original Records

Hayakawa,

Bechet,

Clette

et al. 2023

ApJL

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The Carrington flare in 1859 September is a benchmark, as the earliest reported solar flare and as an event with one of the greatest terrestrial impacts. To date, no rigorous estimate of the energy of this flare has been made on the basis of the only direct observation available, its white-light emission. Here, we exploit the historical observations to obtain a magnitude estimate and express it in terms of its GOES soft X-ray class. From Carrington’s original drawings, we estimated the area of the white-light flaring region to be 116 ± 25 msh. Carrington’s account allows us to estimate the flare blackbody brightness temperature as ≈8800–10,900 K, given the most plausible interpretation of the reported flare brightness. This leads to an unprecedented class estimate of ≈X80 (X46–X126), on the modern revised GOES scale (a factor 1.43 higher than the traditional one). This substantially exceeds earlier estimates but is based on an explicit interpretation of Carrington’s description. We also describe an alternative but less plausible estimation of the flare brightness, as adopted previously, to obtain a class estimate of ≈X14 (X9–X19). This now-deprecated scenario gives an estimate similar to that of with those of directly observed modern great flares. Approximations with “equivalent area,” based on the Hinode observations, lead to comparable magnitudes and approve our estimates, though with a larger uncertainty range. We note that our preferred estimate is higher than the currently used value of X64.4 ± 7.2 (revised) based on indirect geomagnetic measurements.

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Section: Source Records and Area Measurementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Magnitude Estimates for the Carrington Flare in 1859 September: As Seen from the Original Records

Hayakawa,

Bechet,

Clette

et al. 2023

ApJL

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“…The last decade was marked by a rekindled interest in and extensive study of sunspot data, leading to a recovery of many new data, as well as corrections of existing records (e.g. Arlt et al 2013Arlt et al , 2016Vaquero et al 2016;Carrasco et al 2018Carrasco et al , 2019Carrasco et al , 2021aHayakawa et al 2020Hayakawa et al , 2021aHayakawa et al , 2022Vokhmyanin et al 2020;Bhattacharya et al 2021). Furthermore, various issues with the cross-calibration and compilation approaches of records of individual observers have been realised (Clette & Lefèvre 2016Lockwood et al 2016;Usoskin et al 2016b), leading to new techniques and several alternative GSN series (Usoskin et al 2016c(Usoskin et al , 2021aWillamo et al 2017;Chatzistergos et al 2017;Svalgaard & Schatten 2016;Cliver & Ling 2016) as well as version 2 of ISN (ISNv2 Clette & Lefèvre 2016).…”

Section: Sunspot Recordsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Long-term changes in solar activity and irradiance

Chatzistergos¹,

Krivova²,

Yeo³

2023

Preprint

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The Sun is the main energy source to Earth, and understanding its variability is of direct relevance to climate studies. Measurements of total solar irradiance (TSI) exist since 1978, but this is too short compared to climate-relevant time scales. Coming from a number of different instruments, these measurements require a cross-calibration, which is not straightforward, and thus several composite records have been created. All of them suggest a marginally decreasing trend since 1996. Most composites also feature a weak decrease over the entire period of observations, which is also seen in observations of the solar surface magnetic field and is further supported by Ca ii K data. Some inconsistencies, however, remain and overall the magnitude and even the presence of the long-term trend remain uncertain. Different models have been developed, which are used to understand the irradiance variability over the satellite period and to extend the records of solar irradiance back in time. Differing in their methodologies, all models require proxies of solar magnetic activity as input. The most widely used proxies are sunspot records and cosmogenic isotope data on centennial and millennial time scale, respectively. None of this, however, offers a sufficiently good, independent description of the long-term evolution of faculae and network responsible for solar brightening. This leads to significant uncertainties in the amplitude of the long-term changes in solar irradiance. Here we review recent efforts to improve irradiance reconstructions on time scales longer than the solar cycle and to reduce the existing uncertainty in the magnitude of the long-term variability. In particular, we highlight the potential of using 3D magnetohydrodynamical simulations of the solar atmosphere as input to more physical irradiance models and of historical full-disc Ca ii K observations encrypting direct facular information back to 1892.

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“…This led to extensive efforts to recover new data and to correct mistakes in the digital databases of old sunspot records (e.g. Arlt et al 2013Arlt et al , 2016Vaquero et al 2016;Carrasco et al 2018Carrasco et al , 2019Carrasco et al , 2021aHayakawa et al 2020aHayakawa et al ,b, 2021aVokhmyanin et al 2020;Bhattacharya et al 2021). Sunspot number series were also drastically updated and scrutinized leading to a new version of ISNv2 (Clette and Lefèvre 2016) and a number of alternative group sunspot number (GSN) series (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is there a link between the length of the solar cycle and Earth’s temperature?

Chatzistergos

2022

Rend. Fis. Acc. Lincei

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The Sun provides most of external energy to Earth’s system and thus has the potential of influencing it. Various studies reported a correlation between the solar cycle length and the northern hemisphere temperatures on Earth. Here, we reassess the cycle length record by incorporating the newly revised and updated sunspot number series as well as plage area composite, before comparing it to Earth temperature records. We find that cycle length series constructed from sunspot and plage data exhibit the same behaviour, both showing a downward trend after 1940. Our results suggest that the agreement between solar cycle lengths and temperatures found earlier is an artefact of (1) some arbitrary choices made by those studies when constructing the cycle length series as well as (2) a rather short time interval, to which the analyses were restricted. When considering the entire period of reliable sunspot and temperature data, these records diverge before about 1870 and after 1960. We also find a poor agreement between Earth temperatures and cycle length when using plage areas instead of sunspot data to derive cycle lengths. Our result of the divergence between cycle length series and Earth’s temperature after 1960 implies that the cycle length cannot be used to support a solar origin for the warming on Earth over the last 5 decades.

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A Modern Reconstruction of Richard Carrington’s Observations (1853–1861)

Cited by 10 publications

References 28 publications

Magnitude Estimates for the Carrington Flare in 1859 September: As Seen from the Original Records

Magnitude Estimates for the Carrington Flare in 1859 September: As Seen from the Original Records

Long-term changes in solar activity and irradiance

Is there a link between the length of the solar cycle and Earth’s temperature?

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