Solar Cycle 24 has officially started

Question from a solar neophyte if anyone has the answer. When talking about solar cycles, how exactly are the beginning and end of a cycle officially defined? Does the appearance of the first reversed-polarity, high-lattitude sunspot officially start the new cycle and end the old cycle? There must be an overlap period where the new cycle spots co-exist with the old cycle, low-lattitude spots. How is this managed? Seems like the old cycle can’t end until its spots cease.
I have yet to find this cleanly described but it seems like it is an important point when trying to make the cycle length/temperature correlation.

Sounds a lot like the named storm thing that NHC is putting out. I think I will wait a little longer to see if it was real. Yeah I know about the ‘particular type and the lags and all, but still one does not a trend make. I remember a few months back when NOAA started the same thing, and then there were the cycle 24 predictions that weren’t …
And didn’t NASA just own up to some, ahem, ‘errors’ in the USHCN temperature record that went undetected by them. And aren’;t those USHCN weather stations in such a fine state of repair that the temperature readings are surly reliable and accurate.
BTW, did the NHC name the storm that hit California to add to the bogus total for the 2007 season? Or was pushing it into 2008 a little much to hide.
I don’t think these agencies are either an honest neutral science broker, nor are they a disinterested party any longer in the events they portend to witness. The agenda driven science has completely taken over these government agencies — NOAA, NASA, NHC, they are all in the same boat pushing the hype for the same reason, more taxes to fund themselves with.
You would wish the real scientists wouldn’t go along, but the lure of grant money is too great I would guess.

Re: Solar cycle starting date. There isn’t a hard definition and the date will likely be adjusted upto years after the fact.
The assigned date has come 9 to 24 months following the first reversed spot at high latitude for prior cycles. Spots of both cycles, 23 & 24 will likely appear for the next 2-3 years before a date will become solid. There were a couple, likely spurious spots, in the summer of 2006 so we aren’t 100% certain that counter is starting now.
The original assigned start of cycle 23 was May 1996 but that was later adjusted to Sept. 1996. One can find the archived Daily Sunspot Data at the SEC’s ftp server.
If one graphs the spots of the two cycles, 23 diminishing in number while 24 increasing, the spot where the lines cross will fall close to the assigned date. Jan Alvestad’s dxlc site has past curves for all the cycles, one can compare those with the current cycles. I would expect this decay to look like those about 180 to 200 years ago, i.e., more than a year remains until the official starting date.

Can you explain in regular folk understanding what that means? Does this affect climate and seasons? —Please reply….Thanks….

Riverof liveis a joy:
Take a look at this press release: http://www.spaceandscience.net/id16.html
“What we are saying today is that my own research and that of the other scientists at the SSRC verifies that NASA is right about one thing – a solar cycle of 50 or lower is headed our way. With this next solar minimum predicted by NASA, what I call a “solar hibernation,” the SSRC forecasts a much colder Earth just as it has transpired before for thousands of years. If NASA is the more accurate on the schedule, then we may see even warmer temperatures before the bottom falls out. If the SSRC and other scientists around the world are correct then we have only a few years to prepare before 20-30 years of lasting and possibly dangerous cold arrive.”
When asked about what this will mean to the average person on the street, Casey was firm. “The last time this particular cycle regenerated was over 200 years ago. I call it the “Bi-Centennial Cycle” solar cycle. It took place between 1793 and 1830, the so-called Dalton Minimum, a period of extreme cold that resulted in what historian John D. Post called the ‘last great subsistence crisis.’”
Not sure if you can place 100% trust on this press release, but I would consider it one possibility.
FROM ANTHONY: I have doubts about the veracity of this organization/individual. I had this press release days ago but since I couldn’t verify the source beyond a shell of a web page, I did not post this. Take this all with a grain of salt or two.

Another idjit question… With respect to the word “reversed” in the context of magnetic polarity, sunspots, and all that.
In some places I see “reversed” used as an attribute of the sunspot, so the question here is: “reversed” with respect to the Sun itself, or “reversed” with respect to the previous sunspot? Group of sunspots? ???
In other places I see “reversed” used as an attribute of the Sun itselt, so is it with respect to what it was last cycle?
Or am I hopelessly confused?
And maybe I can help with the “what it means” questions–some people (illiterate me being one, for what ever that is worth) believe that the temperature of things here is more a factor of how much energy arrives from the Sun, than it is the amount trapped here from where ever it came from. (Mind game: would “greenhouse” be an issue if there was no energy arriving from the Sun?) This all assumes you accept that when the Sun is “active” (sunspots and all that) there is more energy being flinged into space than when it is quite. I believe you can actually prove that for yourself if you have an FM radio that does not “squelch” in between stations. A month ago I think the inter-station noise was not nearly as loud (for the same loudness-knob settings) as it will be when the cycle gets going good.

So much for worrying about global warming. This guy, John Jay Harper, seems to be hinting I need to move to a cave – go out and lay in a supply of lead suits, heavy parkas, insulated boots and a new Y2K food supply. Yikes!

RE: Sheldon and ‘reversed’. The new spots magnetic polarity is reversed with respect to the polarity of the preceeding cycle; the two cycles spots manifest a local magnetic field erupting at the Sun’s surface and this field is very roughly perpendicular to the axis of rotation.
RE: Global temperature and solar activity, the increase in the former is strongly anti-correlated with the length of the solar cycle displayed in Anthony’s histogram; longer cycles are associated with cooling and vice versa. Cycle 23 will be the longest in the graph at 12.5 years.
Russ’s excerpt of the Haigh paper states that the coupling mechanisms, how the energy arrives in the Earth’s system, are poorly understood but principle component analysis has indicated the Sun’s incoming energy is responsible for the lion’s share of warming or cooling.
An example, it has only recently been observed that when the Sun is at minimum its magnetic field dispersed in the plane of the ecliptic tilts south to link with the Geomagnetic field an inputs terawatts into the our system when coronal flares arrive. So the 1996 solar minimum was very active in comparison with the 2008 minimum and as a result a source of warming that this one is not.

River, it’s easy. Low sunspot activity=increased low level cloud formation which leads to increased Earth albedo. Ocean currents react to decrease in warmth. PDO, AO, NAO, SOI, all go negative. Global temps slowly fall to levels of 200 years ago, dropping 1.5c by 2032. The only thing keeping it from getting any colder is the massive amounts of greenhouse gases that we have pumped into the atmosphere.
I’ll bet that’s what Joe D’Aleo is thinking! 🙂

George M. says “I would be willing to bet, however, that some advocacy group will develop a way to blame solar variability on human activity, and want to tax us to fix it.”
The modern world is caught up in the old geocentric versus heliocentric argument. AGW is just a new age wrapper for the geo vs. helio argument. Geo = Green religion and Helio = Objective Science.

Anthony, thank you for the comment. Since I retired and started looking at “global warming” on the web I have found that almost everything needs to be taken with a grain or more of salt.
Your work has been very revealing. Most people would assume that the temperature record is quite good. My experimentalist colleages who measure indoor air temperatures know it is difficult to remove the radiation effects from such a measurement. I had no idea the US system was so poorly standardized. If standards and measurement conditions keep changing I don’t see how a person can have confidence in century-long trends to a fraction of a degree C.
The idea of global cooling (back to the 70s!) is fascinating. The possible connection from the positions of the planets to solar activity to cosmic rays to cloud formation and changing albedo producing a Dalton minimum style cooling which could have much greater consequences that the current projected warming — but wil it happen? Only time will tell. Our knowledge of this complex system is too rudimentary for confident prediction. (the recent thread on radiation at climate audit is relevant)
I hope Mr Casey will produce a reviewable paper, and better yet, one whose data and methods are sufficiently transparent for public review (like CA). And still it will be several years before we have much confidence in the prediction.
Best wishes,
George
FROM ANTHONY: Thanks George, I doubt Mr. Casey will produce a paper, his background seems to have been exposed., see the previous link from Mr. Sheldon.