Analysis of the Major Parameters in Solar Active Regions Based on the PCA Method

The occurrence of solar flares and solar proton events has a close relation with the solar active regions. A deep analysis on this relation is helpful to build a concrete model of forecasting solar flares and solar proton events. In this paper the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method is adopted to analyze the main parameters of the solar active regions with solar proton events happened in 1997∼2010, the selected parameters include the magnetic classification of sunspot, the McIntosh classification of sunspot group, the area of sunspot group, the 10.7cm radio flux, the flare index, the proton flare position, and the soft X-ray flare intensity. The order of principal component scores for 81 solar activities has been obtained (the score represents the strength of each event), which is compared with the peak flux of solar proton event, the annual mean values of sunspot area and 10.7cm radio flux, it is found that the similarity is very high, and this shows that the principal component scores can represent the strength of solar activity to some extent.