The temporal and spatial evolution of MHD wave modes in sunspots

A. B. Albidah, V. Fedun, A. A. Aldhafeeri, I. Ballai, D. B. Jess, W. Brevis, J. Higham, M. Stangalini, S. S. A. Silva, C. D. MacBride, G. Verth

Published 2023-05-30Version 1

Through their lifetime sunspots undergo a change in their area and shape and, as they decay, they fragment into smaller structures. Here, for the first time we analyze the spatial structure of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) slow body and fast surface modes in observed umbrae as their cross-sectional shape changes. The Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) and Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) techniques were used to analyze 3 and 6 hours SDO/HMI time series of Doppler velocities at the photospheric level of approximately circular and elliptically shaped sunspots. Each time series were divided equally into time intervals, to evidence the change of the sunspots' shape. To identify physical wave modes, the POD/DMD modes were cross-correlated with a slow body mode model using the exact shape of the umbra, whereas the shape obtained by applying a threshold level of the mean intensity for every time interval. Our results show that the spatial structure of MHD modes are affected, even by apparently small changes of the umbral shape, especially in the case of the higher-order modes. For the datasets used in our study, the optimal time intervals to consider the influence of the change in the shape on the observed MHD modes is 37 - 60 minutes. The choice of these intervals is crucial to properly quantify the energy contribution of each wave mode to the power spectrum.