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This work is on a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Access to this work was provided by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) ScholarWorks@UMBC digital repository on the Maryland Shared Open Access (MD-SOAR) platform. Please provide feedback Please support the ScholarWorks@UMBC repository by emailing [email protected] and telling us what having access to this work means to you and why it’s important to you. Thank you. Solar Physics DOI: 10.1007/•••••-•••-•••-••••-• Deciphering Solar Magnetic Activity. II. The Solar Cycle Clock and the Onset of Solar Minimum Conditions Robert J. Leamon 1,2 · Scott W. McIntosh 3 · Sandra C. Chapman 4 · Nicholas W. Watkins 4,5,6 · Subhamoy Chatterjee 7 · Alan M. Title8 © Springer •••• Abstract The Sun's variability is controlled by the progression and interaction of the magnetized systems that form the 22-year magnetic activity cycle (the \Hale Cycle") as they march from their origin at ∼55◦ latitude to the equator, over ∼19 years. We will discuss the end point of that progression, dubbed \ter- minator" events, and our means of diagnosing them. Based on the terminations of Hale Magnetic Cycles, we construct a new solar activity `clock' which maps all solar magnetic activity onto a single normalized epoch. The Terminators appear at phase 0 ∗ 2π on this clock (by definition), then solar polar field reversals B R.J. Leamon [email protected] 1 University of Maryland{Baltimore County, Goddard Planetary Heliophysics Institute, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA 2 NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 672, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA. 3 National Center for Atmospheric Research, P.O. Box 3000, Boulder, CO 80307, USA 4 Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK 5 Centre for the Analysis of Time Series, London School of Economics and Political Science, London WC2A 2AZ, UK 6 School of Engineering and Innovation, STEM Faculty, Open University, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK 7 Southwest Research Institute, 1050 Walnut Street, Suite 300, Boulder, CO 80302, USA arXiv:2012.15186v1 [astro-ph.SR] 30 Dec 2020 8 Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center, 3251 Hanover Street, Building 252, Palo Alto, Colorado 94304, USA SOLA: ms_cameron.tex; 1 January 2021; 2:06; p. 1 R. J. Leamon et al. commence at ∼0:2∗2π, and the geomagnetically quiet intervals centered around solar minimum, start at 0:6 ∗ 2π and end at the terminator, lasting 40% of the normalized cycle length. With this onset of quiescence, dubbed a \pre- terminator," the Sun shows a radical reduction in active region complexity and (like the terminator events) is associated with the time when the solar radio flux crosses F10.7=90 sfu—effectively marking the commencement of solar minimum conditions. In this paper we use the terminator-based clock to illustrate a range of phenomena associated with the pre-terminator `event' that further emphasize the strong interaction of the global-scale magnetic systems of the Hale Cycle. Keywords: Solar Cycle; Flares, Forecasting; Corona, Radio Emission; Magnetic fields, Corona 1. Introduction Sunspots have been considered the canon of solar variability since Schwabe (1844) first noticed the 11-year or so oscillation in their number. Schwabe in- spired Wolf to make his own daily sunspot observations (Wolf, 1861) and then extend the record back another 100 years using the earlier observations of Stau- dacher 1749 to 1787, Flaugergues from 1788 to 1825, before Schwabe's 1826 to 1847 record (e.g., Arlt, 2008; Hathaway, 2015). Wolf then numbered the (complete) cycles from his first minimum in 1755{56; the Cycle 24 minimum was recently announced as occurring in December 2019 and we have already witnessed the first activity of Cycle 25. We know the recent sunspots \belong" to Cycle 25 because the leading polarity spot of each cycle alternates, and at approximately the maximum of each sunspot cycle, the orientation of the Sun's dipole magnetic field flips. The more fundamental period of solar activity is thus the 22-year magnetic cycle, or \Hale cycle" after Hale et al. (1919). In the century since Hale, much effort has been put into modelling the solar cycle (Babcock, 1961; Leighton, 1969) and forecasting the number of spots, culminating in official NASA and NOAA prediction panels (Joselyn et al., 1997; Pesnell, 2008; Biesecker and Upton, 2019). These reports were issued at the minimum of their respective cycles. Recently, we introduced the concept of the \Terminator," as a new, physically- motivated, means of timing the onset of solar cycles (McIntosh et al., 2019; Leamon et al., 2020). The canonical measure, the (committee-defined) mini- mum of the sunspot number, is physically arbitrary (McIntosh et al., 2020a,b). Sunspot minimum is defined during an epoch where the cumulative effect of four simultaneously decreasing and increasing quantities|the number of new and old cycle polarity spots in each hemisphere as the magnetic systems on which they exist—(significantly) overlap in time. Considering a precise date|identically when there is no more old cycle polarity flux left on the disk|a terminator marks the end of a Hale magnetic cycle. Terminators are inextricably linked to the evolution of the \Extended Solar Cycle;" (Leroy and Noens, 1983) as a proxy of the Hale Cycle, and illustrate that there is far more complexity to the Sun's magnetism than sunspots|the global scale interaction of the Hale Cycle's SOLA: ms_cameron.tex; 1 January 2021; 2:06; p. 2 The Solar Cycle Clock magnetic systems shape the output of our star and its evolution. We are just beginning to explore the expressions of this behavior. 1.1. The Extended Solar Cycle The term Extended Solar Cycle (ESC) first appeared in the literature in the late 1980s (Wilson et al., 1988), although observational evidence had been appearing over that decade indicating that magnetic activity from one \cycle" overlaps for some period of time with the last (Leroy and Noens, 1983; Wilson, 1994), often up to a few years. The culmination of many years of painstaking observation, cataloging, and individual publication by a number of prominent observers of the time, the extended cycle is a pattern formed by a host of observables in latitude and time. Some of those observables are easily associable with a magnetic nature, such as prominences and filaments (Bocchino, 1933; Hansen and Hansen, 1975; McIntosh, 1992; Tlatov, Kuzanyan, and Vasil'yeva, 2016) and ephemeral active regions (Harvey and Martin, 1973), and the gross features in the Sun's green-line corona (Altrock, 1997). The overlapping zonal flow patterns of the torsional oscil- lation (Howard and Labonte, 1980; Snodgrass and Wilson, 1987) still defy clear magnetic explanation, although a \shadow" of reduced differential flow caused by action of the Lorentz force is a recent plausible development (Mahajan, Nandy, and Martens, 2019). As presented by Wilson, these multi-scale manifestations of solar activity, shared a common trend. The resulting composite pattern, simply put, followed the wings of the sunspot butterfly backward in time by up to ten years and to significantly higher latitudes such that, over a few sunspot cycles it was clear that the extended butterflies overlapped one another in space and time. It is interesting to note that papers predating Wilson's referred to the long baseline of geomagnetic data being consistent with the signature of temporally overlapping activity cycles on the Sun (Mayaud, 1975; Legrand and Simon, 1981). The ESC picture has languished since the publication of Wilson's book (Wilson, 1994). There is considerable overlap in the author list of the present manuscript (and indeed title) and the recent submission to to Solar Physics, \Deciphering Solar Magnetic Activity: 140 Years Of The `Extended Solar Cycle'|Mapping the Hale Cycle" (McIntosh et al., 2020a), which follows in the footsteps of Wilson, Harvey and others by comprehensively studying the observed patterns of magnetic solar activity from filaments (hence the `140 Years' in the title), coronal emission lines, and the torsional oscillation, in addition to the counting of spots. Here we expand on and build on the ESC framework of Wilson and our preceding works, including the concept of the Terminator, to explain the Hale Cycle as a clock, albeit one whose hour hand moves at a different rate every revolution. 1.2. Coronal Bright Points Our preceding work on the (extended) solar cycle (McIntosh et al., 2014a; McIn- tosh et al., 2019; Leamon et al., 2020; McIntosh et al., 2020a) has been driven through the study of ubiquitous small features observed in the Sun's extreme- ultraviolet corona, \EUV Bright Points," or BPs (Golub et al., 1974; Hara and SOLA: ms_cameron.tex; 1 January 2021; 2:06; p. 3 R. J. Leamon et al. Nakakubo-Morimoto, 2003; McIntosh and Gurman, 2005). What Harvey and Martin (1973) referred to as \ephemeral active regions" we now understand to be (the larger) BPs. The drift behavior of Bright Points relative to solar rotation implies that they are deeply rooted below the surface, and thus are associated with the evolution of the rotationally-driven giant convective scale cells (McIn- tosh et al., 2014b) that had vertices that were dubbed \g-nodes." Together, these features permit the tracking of the magnetic activity bands of the 22-year mag- netic cycle of the Sun that extend the conventional picture of decadal-scale solar variability. Thus the culmination inference of our (and colleagues') preceding work is that the global-scale (intra- and extra-hemispheric) interaction of these magnetic activity bands was required to explain the appearance and evolution of sunspots on the magnetic bands and thus to shape the (extended) solar cycle, as illustrated in Figure 1.