Paper detail

Detection of Flux Emergence, Splitting, Merging, and Cancellation of Network Fields. II Apparent Unipolar Flux Change and Cancellation

In this second paper in the series, we investigate occurrence frequencies of apparent unipolar processes, cancellation, and emergence of patch structures in quiet regions. Apparent unipolar events are considerably more frequent than cancellation and emergence as per our definition, which is consistent with Lamb et al. (2013). Furthermore, we investigate the frequency distributions of changes in flux during apparent unipolar processes are and found that they concentrate around the detection limit of the analysis. Combining these findings with the results of our previous paper, Iida et al. (2012), that merging and splitting are more dominant than emergence and cancellation, these results support the understanding that apparent unipolar processes are actually interactions with and among patches below the detection limit and that there still are numerous flux interactions between the flux range in this analysis and below the detection limit. We also investigate occurrence frequency distributions of flux decrease during cancellation. We found a relatively strong dependence, 2.48$\pm$0:26 as a power-law index. This strong dependence on flux is consistent with the model, which is suggested in the previous paper.