The variation in the response of solar full-disc magnetographs

Abstract

Context. The utility of full solar disc magnetograms as a long-term record of the photospheric magnetic field requires an understanding of how stable these observations are with time and the systematic differences between the various instruments. Aims. We compared magnetograms from the KPVT/SPM, SoHO/MDI, SOLIS/VSM, and SDO/HMI with the aim of probing the effect on measured solar magnetism of the variation in instrument response with time, magnetogram signal level, and position on the solar disc. Methods. Taking near-simultaneous observations from the various instruments, we examined the surface coverage by magnetic activity and the effect of cross-calibrating the various instruments under different assumptions. Results. By comparing the surface coverage by magnetic activity in the observations from the various instruments, we traced the effect of the time variation in instrument response on the longitudinal magnetogram signal and disc-integrated unsigned magnetic flux. This yielded evidence of acute changes in the response of MDI and VSM with certain events such as the SoHO vacation in 1998 and the upgrade of the VSM CCD camera in 2009. Excluding these changes, the effect of instrument instability on the magnetogram signal and disc-integrated magnetic flux appears to be rather benign, with an associated uncertainty of less than 2%. We determined the magnetogram signal ratio between each instrument pairing as a function of magnetogram signal level and distance from disc centre and with it cross-calibrated the various instruments. We compared the result with that from repeating the cross-calibration with the overall magnetogram signal ratio. This allowed us to estimate the uncertainty in the magnetogram signal associated with the variation in instrument response with magnetogram signal level and distance from disc centre to be about 8%–14%. The corresponding uncertainty in the disc-integrated magnetic flux is about 7%–23%. Conclusions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of its kind to quantify the uncertainty in measured magnetism from the variation in instrument response with time, magnetogram signal level, and disc position. The results here will be useful to the interpretation of SPM, MDI, VSM, and HMI magnetograms. As examples, we applied our findings to selected results from earlier studies based on such data.