The waldmeier effect: An artifact of the definition of wolf sunspot number?

We show that the well-known "Waldmeier effect," or anticorrelation between the peak in sunspot number of a cycle and the time from minimum to reach that peak, is not present in sunspot area data averaged in the same way. With a 13-rotation Gaussian running average applied to both sunspot number and sunspot area, we find the correlation between cycle rise time and cycle peak is r = -0.71 for sunspot number and r = 10^-4 for sunspot number. Thus the Waldmeier effect may be specific to only Wolf sunspot number.