Distribution characteristics of a solar-surface magnetic field in the recent four solar cycles

Solar cycles are inherent to the Sun, which experiences temporal changes in its magnetic activity via the surface distribution of the solar magnetic field. This raises a fundamental question of how to derive the distribution characteristics of a solar-surface magnetic field that are responsible for individual solar cycles. We present a new approach to deriving as long-term and large-scale distribution characteristics of this quantity as was ever obtained; that is, we conducted a population ecological analysis of Wilcox Solar Observatory (WSO) Synoptic Charts which provide a more than 40-year time series of latitude-longitude maps of solar-surface magnetic fields. In this approach, solar-surface magnetic fields are assumed as hypothetical trees with magnetic polarities (magnetic trees) distributed on the Sun. Accordingly, we identified a peculiarity of cycle 23 with a longer period than an average period of 11 years; specifically we found that the negative surface magnetic field had much more clumped distributions than the positive surface magnetic field during the first one-third of this cycle, while the latter was dominant over the former. The Sun eventually spent more than one-third of cycle 23 recovering from these imbalances.