Temporal Variation of the Hemispheric Solar Rotation

Abstract

The daily sunspot numbers of the whole disk as well as the northern and southern hemispheres from January 1, 1945 to December 31, 2010 are used to investigate the temporal variation of the rotational cycle length through the continuous wavelet transformation analysis method. The auto-correlation function analysis of daily hemispheric sunspot numbers shows that the southern hemisphere rotates faster than the northern hemisphere. The results obtained from the wavelet transformation analysis are: there exists no direct relationship between the variation trend of the rotational cycle length and the variation trend of solar activity in the two hemispheres; the rotational cycle length of both hemispheres has no significant period appearing at the 11 years, but has significant period of about 7.6 years. Analysis concerning the solar cycle dependence of the rotational cycle length shows that in the whole disk and the northern hemisphere acceleration seems to appear before the minimum time of solar activity. Furthermore, the cross-correlation study indicates that the rotational cycle length of the two hemispheres has different phases, and the rotational cycle length of the whole disk as well as the northern and southern hemispheres also has phase shifts with the corresponding solar activity. What's more, the temporal variation of North-South (N-S) asymmetry of the rotational cycle length is also studied; it displays the same variation trend as the N-S asymmetry of solar activity in a solar cycle as well as in the considered time interval, and it has two significant periods of 7.7 and 17.5 years. Moreover, the N-S asymmetry of the rotational cycle length and the N-S asymmetry of solar activity are highly correlated. It's inferred that the northern hemisphere should rotate faster at the beginning of solar cycle 24.