Latitude and power characteristics of solar activity in the end of the Maunder minimum

Abstract

Two important sources of information about sunspots in the Maunder minimum are the Sp\"orer catalog and observations of the Paris observatory, which cover in total the last quarter of the 17th and the first two decades of the 18th century. These data, in particular, contain information about sunspot latitudes. As we showed in previous papers, dispersions of sunspot latitude distributions are tightly related to sunspot indices, so we can estimate the level of solar activity in this epoch by a method which is not based on direct calculation of sunspots and is weakly affected by loss of observational data. The latitude distributions of sunspots in the time of transition from the Maunder minimum to the common regime of solar activity proved to be wide enough. It gives evidences in favor of, first, not very low cycle No. -3 (1712-1723) with the Wolf number in maximum W=$100\pm50$, and, second, nonzero activity in the maximum of cycle No. -4 (1700-1711) W=$60\pm45$. Therefore, the latitude distributions in the end of the Maunder minimum are in better agreement with the traditional Wolf number and new revisited indices of activity SN and GN than with the GSN; the latter provide much lower level of activity in this epoch.