New Astronomy 13 (2008) 9397

www.elsevier.com/locate/newast

Wavelet analysis of solar macro-spicule recurrences

a,b,*
A. Ajabshirizadeh , E. Tavabi a, S. Koutchmy c

a
Department of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics, Tabriz University, 51664 Tabriz, Iran
b
Research Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics of Maragha (RIAAM), 55134-441 Maragha, Iran
c
Institut dAstrophysique de Paris & UPMC, 98 Bis Boulevard Arago, F-75014 Paris, France

Received 22 January 2007; received in revised form 8 June 2007; accepted 9 July 2007
Available online 18 July 2007
Communicated by M. van der Klis

Abstract

We looked at the temporal behavior of intensity variations of spicules and macro-spicules observed at the solar limb by TRACE (tran-
sition region and coronal explorer) EUV telescope in the 1600 A channel. Using wavelet analysis technique we got evidence of spicule
oscillations.
The timefrequency analysis provided by the wavelet analysis shows a temporal behavior of spicules with recurrences at periods of
about 210260 s with a typical lifetime of 10 min. Finally, we shortly discuss two scenarios regarding the possible origin of spicule
oscillations.
 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

PACS: 96.60.j

Keywords: Sun; Spicule oscillations-method; Wavelet analysis

1. Introduction
Sandwiched layers between the solar photosphere and
the corona are the chromosphere and the transition region
(TR), an irregular layer of hot plasma at temperatures of
600060,000 K. Some chromospheric radiations in quiet
Sun regions come from spicules and macro-spicules, which
are jet-like chromospheric structures that erupt from the
lower chromosphere at speeds of around 2550 km/s.
Before they were called spikes (Koutchmy and Stellmacher,
1976). They reach heights of 650020,000 km before fading
out of view or falling back towards the solar surface. They
have diameters, all along their length, of only 200500 km
*
Corresponding author. Address: Department of Theoretical Physics
and Astrophysics, Tabriz University, 51664 Tabriz, Iran. Fax:
+984113858959.
E-mail addresses: a-adjab@tabrizu.ac.ir (A. Ajabshirizadeh), tavabi@
tabrizu.ac.ir (E. Tavabi), koutchmy@iap.fr (S. Koutchmy).
(for a recent review, see Sterling, 2000) and are observed in
many optical lines, such as Ha, Hb, H&K of Ca II and
EUV. Temperatures of spicules are dierent, from 104 to
105 (Xia et al., 2005). Spicules are usually seen all around
but well above the limb of the Sun. On the disk they were
historically called mottles in quiet Sun regions but they
should not be confused with the brils of lower altitudes
(see Athay, 1986). They usually show a group behavior
and are concentrated between supergranule cells (see e.g.
the review of Sterling (2000)). At any given time, there
are at least 60,00070,000 spicules on the solar surface
(Zirin, 1988) although Athay (1986) gave a much larger
number. Typical lifetime of spicules are 515 min and
comparable to the photospheric granules lifetime. Macro-
spicules or spikes appear to be giant spicules, these
Macro-spicules seem to be comprised of a group of high
spicules (Xia et al., 2005).
Macro-spicules were discovered from the Skylab He II
(304 A) imaging experiments. Their temperature struc-
ture (log T > 4) extends into the transition region (TR)

1384-1076/$ - see front matter  2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.newast.2007.07.001
94 A. Ajabshirizadeh et al. / New Astronomy 13 (2008) 9397
temperatures and their heights extend into the corona
(Bohlin et al., 1975).
The mechanism of spicule formation and evolution is not
well understood (for the mechanisms of formation, see
reviews of Sterling, 2000 and also Lorrain and Koutchmy,
1996; Filippov et al., 2007). The investigation of solar spic-
ules is necessary in order to understand TR and coronal
heating (Kudoh and Shibata, 1999). The magneto-acoustic
waves may get dissipated after transforming to smaller spa-
tial scales through phase mixing or resonant absorption
(Walsh and Ireland, 2003; Kudoh and Shibata, 1999). The
propagation of MHD waves through the chromosphere
with shorter period than the spicule lifetime can be traced
through spicule observation (Kukhianidze et al., 2006).
The existence of 5 min oscillations in spicules, reported rst
by Kulidzanishvili and Nikolsky (1978) and more recently
the existence of 35 min oscillations in dark mottles reported
by De Pontieu et al. (2003) and in spicules by Xia et al.
(2005), seem to agree with periods that we obtained in this
article using a dierent method. The diagnostic can be
improved by the use of the wavelet analysis, which is a
powerful tool to obtain information on the temporal behav-
ior of an oscillatory signal (see Baudin et al., 1996).
2. Observations and image processing
The data used in this work consists of a rather long
sequence of observation of spicules from the Transition
Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) EUV telescope
done in part in the 1600 A UV continuum channel, made
on July 6, 2000. The 1600 A channel has a temperature sen-
sitive range of 4.010 103 K (Handy et al., 1999). The
duration of observation was 58 min from 7:09 to 8:07
UT at location, in solar coordinate center, (Xcen =  29300 ,
Ycen =  94300 ); the pixel spatial resolution is 000 .5. The time
interval between successive frames was 15 s. The images
can be found at the TRACE Web site: (http://trace.lmsal.
com/trace_cat.html).
In this section, we give a brief outline of some of the
main features of image processing by wavelet analysis that
will be used.
There exist various extensions of the one dimensional
wavelet transform to two-dimensional and indeed multi-
dimensional wavelet. De-noising of image is an interesting
application of wavelet analysis.
The underlying model for the noisy image is basically of
the following form:
An; m Bn; m rEn; m 2-1
where n, m is the dimensions of the image.
In the simplest mode we suppose that E(n, m) is a Gauss-
ian white noise and the noise level r is supposed to be equal
to 1 (many other statistical noise estimations are proposed
such as: histogram, median, minimax threshold, Birge
Masart threshold, global universal threshold, etc.).
We assume that each image A(n, m) represents an obser-
vation of true astrophysical image, B(n, m) with a noise
E(n, m) of unknown nature added. We intend to reduce the
noise from A(n, m) by wavelet thresholding to recover a
better image.
This is a non parametric method; this means that there is
no particular assumption about the data; the only assump-
tion is that the noise nature remains the same after the
wavelet transform. As we know dierent wavelets have dif-
ferent performances for the images and there is no univer-
sally best wavelet transform for removal noise for all the
dierent kinds of image because the performance of wave-
let lter depends principally on inherent statistical informa-
tion of the image then we intent to emphasize the most
important features in the images (for spicules to detect
the edges and increase the visibility of very small scale
features).
Briey, this procedure involves three steps:
1. Choose a wavelet; choose a level N. Compute the wave-
let decomposition of input image at level N.
2. Threshold detail coecients for each level from 1 to N.
Select a threshold and apply this to the detail coecients.
3. Compute wavelet reconstruction using the original
approximation coecients of level N and the modied
detail coecients of levels from 1 to N.
For the details of calculations involved, see the descrip-
tion given on the O. Koutchmy Website: (http://www.ann.
jussieu.fr/~koutchmy/debruitage/spicul~2E.html).
In our case, we prefer to choose Daubechies-4 (these
wavelets have no explicit expression except for Daube-
chies-1, the rst and simplest member of this family, which
is the Haar wavelet and resembles a step function) and glo-
bal universal threshold, after testing dierent mother wave-
let functions and noise estimation, in the following from
p
thr q 2 lognm where [n, m] is the image size and q is
the noise standard deviation. The initial image was decom-
posed at level 3. We obtain a threshold number thr = 7 (see
Fig. 1).
3. Time series analysis using the wavelet transform
A wavelet analysis is capable of revealing the time/fre-
quency aspects of the data that other signal analysis tech-
niques miss (such as Fourier analysis). As we know the
wavelet is ideal for analyzing non-stationary time series
or time series where one expects localized variations of
power, since it allows a local decomposition of timescales
in the time series. The temporal information is obtained
by computing the correlation of input signal f(t) with a
mother wavelet function w, which is a function of nite
duration in time (where duration has to be precisely
dened, see Baudin et al., 1994; Christopoulou et al., 2003):
Z t  t 
0
CWTs; t0 f tw dt 3-1
s
where s is the wavelet scale and variation of t allows the
translation of the analyzing wavelet in time. The variation
 A. Ajabshirizadeh et al. / New Astronomy 13 (2008) 9397
Fig. 1. Top: A Trace 1600 A image take from a time series from 7:09 to
8:07 UT on 2000 July 6. Bottom: The selected region by box and shows jet-
like structures in the chromosphere, before (a) and after (b) denoising
using Daubechies-4 and after (c) using the unsharp mask (from Christo-
poulou et al., 2001). In (c) we can see spicules and macro-spicules with
possible small loops at their feet. In (c) black crosses mark location where
we found evidence of oscillations with signicant (95%) wavelet power (COI; see Torrence and Compo, 1998).
for three cycles, see Fig. 2a and b.
of these two parameters leads to the time/frequency local-
ization. Several dierent mother wavelet functions can be
selected, but when applied to an oscillatory signal the best
choice is the Morlet wavelet (Grossmann and Morlet,
1984). The Morlet wavelet is just a sine wave modulated
by a Gaussian window:
t     
ikt 1  t 2
w exp exp  ; 3-2
s s 2 s
95
A wavelet coecient CWT (continue wavelet transforms)
depends on two parameters, the time t and the scale s. Thus
it will provide information around time t and around fre-
quency t:
p
k 2 K2
t : 3-3
4ps
The global wavelet spectrum is an averaged power spec-
trum for all the scales and frequencies. It is similar to a
smooth Fourier power spectrum and it is dened as the
squared modulus proportional to the energy of the signal.
This information will be displayed in two-dimensional
plots, showing variations of the energy with time and fre-
quency. One of the main problems of this method is to
optimize the resolution in both time and frequency do-
mains; the parameter k of Eq. (3-2) of the wavelet allows
the resolution to be set to the required values. For larger
values of k, we get a better frequency resolution but poorer
time localization, in agreement with the Heisenbergs rela-
tion (Baudin et al., 1994). We choose k = 6 (following De
Moortel et al. (2004)) which is a good compromise between
time and frequency resolution (t  1/s), enabling the study
of the temporal variation with satisfactory time localiza-
tion and a signicantly accurate frequency resolution.
Thus, with suitably optimized parameters, the time/fre-
quency analysis will be able to give signicant information
in both domains.
4. Discussion-results
In this section we analyze the time behavior of the inten-
sity variations. In Eq. (3-1), f is the input signal, it is the
integrated intensity over the selected spicule (we select a
box and sum the emission within that box).
The results of wavelet power analysis for two dierent
spicules are shown in Fig. 2a and b. In this gure the left
plots show wavelet power: the horizontal axis is the time
in seconds, while the vertical axis is the period in seconds.
Darker shades correspond to higher power (95% con-
dence) of the wavelet coecients. The contours determine
the 95% condence level which was calculated by assuming
a white noise background spectrum. Wavelet transform
suers from the wraparound errors at both edges of a
time series (of nite length). The regions in which these
eects are important are dened by the cone of inuence
The COI region, or in other words the region that suers
from edge eects, is chosen as the e-folding time of the
Morlet wavelet and it is presented as a cross-hatched in
each plot.
The right plots show, from a precise investigation of the
input signal (f) variations. We have investigated 20 dierent
spicules and obtained that nearly 30% of them show (quasi)
periodic behavior.
Our results verify that the input signal (f) shows distinct
peaks for periods of about 210260 s; with frequency
around 4.5 mHz (spicules show typically a range of
96 A. Ajabshirizadeh et al. / New Astronomy 13 (2008) 9397

Fig. 2. Left plots show time/frequency variation of the power spectrum for two dierent spicules. Cross-hatched regions indicate the cone of inuence
(COI). The darkest regions mean higher power, and the contours correspond to the 95% condence level (see text and reference for details). Right plots:
The input signal (f) curves (f vs. time), correspond to the location of black crosses in Fig. 1c bottom panel, and show that spicule oscillations are not
steady harmonic wave, but they are quasi-periodic features, or in other words wave trains of nite duration.

lifetimes from 500 to 600 s, for three cycles). Spicules rise
rapidly and reach their maximum height (after about
12 min), remain about 1 min in this phase, and then start
to fall back down.
An important question is: What is the cause of these
periodic ows? Based on this consideration, our suggested
scenarios are the following:
(i) The periodic upward and downward motion of spic-
ules could be due to the nonstationary character of
granular motion (see Baudin et al., 1996), i.e., spic-
ules oscillated when granules move with respect to
each other.
(ii) These oscillations seem to be related to p-modes, but
it is evident that if spicules are driven by p-modes,
crucial details about their formation are still missing.
Clearly, not all spicular ows are periodic, whereas
most photospheric oscillations are. In addition, the
horizontal scale for amplitude coherence of p-modes
(8000 km) is well beyond the width of brils (De
Pontieu et al., 2003).
However, we should remark the increasing of local
acoustic cut-o period (Pc) inside the spicule because of
the higher temperatures and, more importantly, the spic-
ules inclination. Pc dramatically increases from 180 s, in
the upper photosphere, to more than 300 s inside spicules
(see De Pontieu et al., 2004). So, spicules and macro-spic-
ules allow signicant leakage and propagation of p-modes
(periods of 5min) from the photosphere into the chromo-
sphere and TR when inclined motion is considered (Suema-
tsu, 1990).
Several authors have studied the temporal variation of
the intensity of the chromospheric and TR spectral lines.
Doyle et al. (1998) found that the intensities of the TR
spectral line (O V 626.73 A) show oscillations with domi-
nating periods around 250 s with a lifetime approximately
1015 min and for the chromospheric spectral line (HeI
584 A) oscillations appear with periodicity of 220 s and
typical lifetimes were about 1020 min. Moreover, slightly
dierent values of periods and lifetimes of the intensity
oscillations for the transition region and chromosphere
have been reported by Hansteen et al. (2000), Banerjee
et al. (2001), and more recently by Gomory et al. (2006).
However, our results suggest that some of the chromo-
sphere and TR oscillations may be associated with periodic
ows in spicular structures, because their periods and life-
times are equal, but the relationship of the chromospheric
and TR oscillations with spicule oscillations is less clear.
This could be indicative of a lack of relationship or perhaps
some kind of nonlinear relationship between these oscilla-
tions. A detailed discussion of this subject needs more con-
siderations. A last remark concerns the distinction to be
made between the rather cool spicules and the rather hotter
macro-spicules not to be confused with the SXR coronal
jets.
 A. Ajabshirizadeh et al. / New Astronomy 13 (2008) 9397
Acknowledgements
TRACE is a mission supported by NASA and Lock-
heed. The authors are most grateful to F. Baudin for useful
discussions and critical reading of the manuscript. Image
processing wavelet software was provided by O. Koutchmy
http://www.ann.jussieu.fr/~koutchmy/index_newE.html, and
wavelet analysis software was provided by Torrence and
Compo (http://atoc.colorado.edu/research/wavelets), this
work has been supported partly by RIAAM.
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