Sunspot Counts

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As of 2018.02, the full 24th cycle's data are now part of the sunspot count analysis.

Reporting monthly Sunspot numbers consists of submitting individual observer’s daily counts for a specific month to the AAVSO Solar Section (https://www.aavso.org/solar). These data are maintained in a SQL database. The monthly data then are extracted for analysis using the R statistics package (http://www.R-project.org/). This report is the portion of the analysis concerned with both the raw daily average counts and the data Accuracy, Consistency, and Completeness measures for a particular month. The checks are used to scrub or filter the data to assure only error-free data are used to determine the monthly sunspot number.

The reports consist of four sections: the raw daily average counts (Section 2), the known data errors (Section 3), the processed counts using a Generalized Linear Mixed Model to produce the relative sunspot numbers (Section 4), and supporting information on the model construction (Section 5).

The raw daily average of counts consist of submitted counts from all observers who provided data in the particular month. These averaged counts are reported by the day of the month, and are either from data not scrubbed or corrected data. The table captions indicate which. The errors, if any, are reported according to type.

The Error Tables section contains reported errors on missing data, inconsistencies in year and month, inconsistencies in the reported day number (1-31), seeing coding errors, number of annual observations by observer, and inconsistencies between the reported Wolf number and the calculated Wolf number from the group counts and sunspot counts, among other errors that are given in that section.

The relative sunspot numbers Ra section contains the sunspot numbers after the submitted data are scrubbed and modeled by a Generalized Linear Mixed Model (GLMM). The GLMM is a statistical model that accounts for variation due to random effects and fixed effects. For the Ra model random effects include the AAVSO observer as these observers are a selection from all possible observers, and the fixed effects include seeing conditions at one of four possible levels. More details on GLMM are available in a paper on the sunspot counts research page. The paper title is A Generalized Linear Mixed Model for Enumerated Sunspots.

The supporting information for the model is provided in GLMM06 for clarification.