Developing a Solar Magnetic Catalog Spanning Four Cycles

Bipolar magnetic regions (BMRs) are the cornerstone of solar cycle propagation, the building blocks that give structure to the solar atmosphere, and the origin of the majority of space weather events. However, in spite of their importance, there is no homogeneous BMR catalog spanning the era of systematic solar magnetic field measurements. Here we present the results of an ongoing project to address this deficiency applying the Bipolar Active Region Detection (BARD) code to magnetograms from the 512 Channel of the Kitt Peak Vaccum Telescope, SOHO/MDI, and SDO/HMI.The BARD code automatically identifies BMRs and tracks them as they are rotated by differential rotation. The output of the automatic detection is supervised by a human observer to correct possible mistakes made by the automatic algorithm (like incorrect pairings and tracking mislabels). Extra passes are made to integrate fragmented regions as well as to balance the flux between BMR polarities. At the moment, our BMR database includes 6,885 unique objects (detected and tracked) belonging to four separate solar cycles (21-24).