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INTRODUCTION

Understanding the dynamics of magnetic flux and investigation of emerging magnetic


flux are closely connected to the depth of the main dynamo process in the Sun (Fisher, 2000).
Moreover, observations showed that emerging magnetic flux plays an important role
(Kosovichev, 2009) in initiation of solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CME). Green (2003)
shows on the example of four active regions that majority CME and solar flares occur during or
after new flux emergence. By the example of four active regions Green (2003) showed that the
majority CME and solar flares occur during or after new flux emergence.
Appearance of new observational data (in particular SOHO/MDI, SOLIS, Hinode)
forced the development of theoretical models connected with the emerging flux. Ruzmaikin
(1998) suggested a two dimensional model of emerging magnetic flux explains the appearance of
persistent clusters of emerging flux. He showed that is newly emerging flux tends to appear on
the solar surface at sites where there is a flux already. Kosovichev (2009) also discussed
photospheric and under-photospheric properies of emerging magnetic flux. Magara (2008)
suggested a possible way of investigating the structure of solar-interior magnetic field by
comparing observational data of solar-surface magnetic field from Hinode and numerical
simulations performed for the emergence of invisible under-photospheric magnetic field into the
photosphere. The main difficulty in the way of comparing models and observations related to
the limitations of the capabilities of the spatial resolution. We are not able to observe small-scale
structures of photospheric flux. What we can see are already aggregated large-scale patterns.
(Solanki, 2003; Kosovichev, 2009)
A separate problem is the early detection of new magnetic flux in the monitoring mode.
By observing the evolution of AR in time new emerging magnetic flux often could be seen
directly on a sequence of images. However, questions remain how to define it at the initial stage
and how to estimate the "intensity" and the "speed" of the flux required for comparison with a
models for example Ruzmaikin (1998).Since the magnetograms represent digital images, the
main approach for solving these problems is using modern techniques developed for the digital
images processing (Chan and Shen, 2005). Thus Fu and others (2008) suggested the use the
Kalman filter and SVM method for automatic detection of emerging flux by the sequence of
magnetograms. Among the many approaches, we would like to note the work of Golovko, et al
(2008), in which a new flow is identified by the individual points of maximum singularity. These
points are located after the conversion of digital images into the Hölder map (Kruglun et al,
2007).
In this paper we consider the topological approach to the detection of a new magnetic flux based
on the analysis of connected components (Robins et al, 1998; Makarenko et al, 2003). Its
advantage lies in the fact that the method can detect the emergence of flux at the early stages of
its appearance and allows us to track the evolution of flux with time. We show a comparison of
this evolution and flare activity for a number of solar active regions.
The heuristic idea of discovering a new magnetic flux is as follows. Each fragment of a
magnetogram containing AR is a digital image, each pixel of which encodes the intensity of the
radial component of the magnetic field I (x) . So visually it represents a gray-level image. Draw
{ }
a plane I (x) = h and consider the "excursion set" Ah ( I ) = x ∈ S I (x) ≥ h . It is formed by
all those pixels, in which the intensity I (x) exceeds the specified h level. Mark these pixels
as black and others as white. After such a procedure we will receive a binary image.
Let's see what will happen with such an image with changing the resolution. Consider the left
panel of Figure 1 with different resolutions. In the original resolution (4 × 4) , we distinguish 5
black pixels. If we reduce the resolution to (2 × 2) (Fig.1, center), we see 3 elements. Finally, at
the resolution (1 × 1) we will see only one black box.

Figure 1.

When the level h is increased , the number of distinct elements will vary. Observing the
evolution of AR we will choose a level of resolution with the number of distinct elements close
to zero. If, over time the number of distinct elements begin to increase, they can be interpreted as
a sign of a new emerging magnetic flux. In order to formalize this idea, we need some concepts
from topology.

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