The New Composite Solar Flare Index from Solar Cycle 17 to Cycle 24 (1937-2020)

The chromosphere is a highly dynamic outer plasma layer of the Sun. Its physical processes accounting for the variability are poorly understood. We reconstructed the solar chromospheric flare index (SFI) to study the solar chromospheric variability from 1937 to 2020. The new SFI database is a composite record of the Astronomical Institute Ondrejov Observatory of the Czech Academy of Sciences from 1937 -1976 and the records of the Kandilli Observatory of Istanbul, Turkey from 1977 - 2020. The SFI records are available in daily, monthly, and yearly resolutions. We carried out the time-frequency analyses of the new 84-year long SFI records using the wavelet transform. We report the periodicities of 21.88 (Hale cycle), 10.94 (Schwabe cycle), 5.2 (quasi-quinquennial cycle), 3.5, 1.7, 1, 0.41 (or 149.7 days, Rieger cycle), 0.17 (62.1 days), 0.07 (25.9 days, solar rotational modulation) years. All these periodicities seem always present and persistent throughout the observational interval. Thus, we suggest that there is no reason to assume these solar periodicities are absent from other solar cycles. Time variations of the amplitude of each oscillation or periodicity were also studied using the inverse wavelet transform. We found that for the SFI the most active flare cycles over the record were Cycles 17, 19, and 21, while Cycles 20, 22, 23, and 24 were the weakest ones with Cycle 18 was intermediate in flare activity. This shows several differences to the equivalent relationships for solar activity implied by sunspot number records. Furthermore, this confirms that solar activity trends and variability in the chromosphere as captured by SFI are not necessarily the same as those of the Sun's photosphere, as implied by the sunspot number activity records, for instance. We have also introduced a new signal/noise wavelet coherence metric to analyze two different chromospheric indices available (i.e. the SFI and the disk-integrated chromospheric Ca 11 K activity indices) and to quantify the differences and similarities of the oscillations within the solar chromosphere. Our findings suggest the importance of carrying out additional co-analyses with other solar activity records to find physical inter-relations and connections between the different solar layers from the photosphere, the chromosphere to the corona.