On the facular area surrounding decaying sunspots

The change in facular area around decaying sunspots is investigated. The data are from full-disk photometric images from CFDT1 ( 5 arc sec pixels) obtained at the Ca II K- line lambda = 393.4 nm. The 31 active regions are from a list previously used to study the decay rate of sunspots. We find a weak, marginally significant relation between spot decay rate and growth of the surrounding facular region (r(2) = 0.1255). We conclude that, for this group of decaying sunspots, the growth or decay of the surrounding facular region was not clearly related to the decay rate of an active region's sunspots.