Why the Sunspot Cycle Is Double Peaked

Abstract

Many sunspot cycles are double peaked. In 1967, Gnevyshev suggested that actually all cycles have two peaks generated by different physical mechanisms, but sometimes the gap between them is too short for the maxima to be distinguished in indices of the total sunspot activity. Here, we show that indeed all cycles have two peaks easily identified in sunspot activity in different latitudinal bands. We study the double peaks in the last 12 sunspot cycles and show that they are manifestation of the two surges of toroidal field—the one generated from the poloidal field advected all the way on the surface to the poles, down to the tachocline and equatorward to sunspot latitudes, and another one generated from the poloidal field diffused at mid-latitudes from the surface to the tachocline and transformed there into toroidal field. The existence of these two surges of toroidal field is due to the relative magnitudes of the speed of the large-scale solar meridional circulation and the diffusivity in the solar convection zone which are estimated from geomagnetic data.