The Distribution of Cell Sizes of the Solar Chromospheric Network

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Abstract

This paper studies the cellular pattern of the supergranular network. We present an algorithm to draw a surface-lling cell pattern on an uninterrupted two-day sequence of Ca II K ltergrams with a 1 nm bandpass. The 60 ] 40 eld of view contains both quiet and enhanced network and plages. The algorithm uses a threshold-independent method of steepest descent on spatially smoothed and time-averaged images. We determine the distribution function of cell areas and nd a broad, asymmetric spectrum of areas. The distribution is found to be invariant for di erent spatial smoothings if the cell areas are normalized to a unit mean. It is this invariance that leads us to believe we have determined the intrinsic distribution of cell areas. Extrapolation of the average cell size to zero spatial smoothing yields a characteristic cell diameter of L \ 1318 Mm. This is roughly half the generally quoted supergranular length scale L B 32 Mm as determined with autocorrelation methods. The di erence in characteristic cell size reects the application of a di erent measurement method : the autocorrelation method as used by Simon & Leighton and others is preferentially weighted towards relatively large cells. We nd no signicant dependence of cell size on local magnetic ux density.

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