Asymmetry of Sunspot Distribution in KAU Solar Observations during 22 and 23 Solar Cycles.docVIP

International Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2013, 3, 480-482 Published Online December 2013 (/journal/ijaa) /10.4236/ijaa.2013.34055 Asymmetry of Sunspot Distribution in KAU Solar Observations during 22 and 23 Solar Cycles Hassan Mohammad Basurah, Amerah Fouad Dhignah, Fouad Yousef Kamal Department of Astronomy, Faculty of Science, King Abudlaziz University, Jeddah, KSA Email: hbasurah@.sa Received October 14, 2013; revised November 10, 2013; accepted November 17, 2013 Copyright ? 2013 Hassan Mohammad Basurah et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ABSTRACT The King Abdul Aziz University (KAU) solar observations of Sunspot on daily passes from 1981 to 2009 are used to investigate the North-South asymmetry variation of the sunspot numbers and its area. We found that the asymmetry dominated to be southern during the last two solar cycles, which evidently exists following a long-term characteristic time scale. Our results were in compliance with the global asymmetry. Keywords: Sunspots; Long Solar Cycles; North-south Solar Asymmetry 1. Introduction Section 2, the observational data and the results are de- scribed. In Sections 3, the conclusions are given. There are many solar activity indices for the solar disk, however all are not identical in the northern or the south- ern solar hemispheres [1-4]. This North-South asymme- try (ANS) is considered to be a new index to assist in tracing the nature of solar activity and to understand the solar cycles and other phenomena. The asymmetry of sunspot distribution and sunspot area in the two solar hemispheres has been noted since the beginning of the last century by [5,6], and has been further demonstrated by [7-9]. Other solar activity indices such as the number of flares