Cliver, Edward W. ; Clette, Frédéric ; Lefèvre, Laure ; Svalgaard, Leif

published in American Astronomical Society, SPD meeting #47, pp. 11.01 (2016)

Abstract: As a result of the Sunspot Number Workshops, five new sunspot series have recently been proposed: a revision of the original Wolf or international sunspot number (Lockwood et al., 2014), a backbone-based group sunspot number (Svalgaard and Schatten, 2016), a revised group number series that employs active day fractions (Usoskin et al., 2016), a provisional group sunspot number series (Cliver and Ling, 2016) that removes flaws in the normalization scheme for the original group sunspot number (Hoyt and Schatten,1998), and a revised Wolf or international number (termed SN) published on the SILSO website as a replacement for the original Wolf number (Clette and Lefèvre, 2016; thttp://www.sidc.be/silso/datafiles). Despite quite different construction methods, the five new series agree reasonably well after about 1900. From 1750 to ~1875, however, the Lockwood et al. and Usoskin et al. time series are lower than the other three series. Analysis of the Hoyt and Schatten normalization factors used to scale secondary observers to their Royal Greenwich Observatory primary observer reveals a significant inhomogeneity spanning the divergence in ~1885 of the group number from the original Wolf number. In general, a correction factor time series, obtained by dividing an annual group count series by the corresponding yearly averages of raw group counts for all observers, can be used to assess the reliability of new sunspot number reconstructions.