brrrrrr

rjb

http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/SOLAR/ftpcosmicrays.html

By eyeballing the tables, it is clear that from one monitor to the next, there are cycles measured by each (which is to be expected). It is also interesting that measurements are different depending on location (like why are Bejing’s numbers so much smaller?), but the cycles are still there. We know that when minimum occurs, we get blasted with cosmic rays, which in theory, can create the process needed for water droplets and clouds to occur. Right now, the sun is deeply asleep with a magnetic number of 66. The length of the minimum is getting quite long, extending the amount of time we are not being protected by the magnetic shield of the sun.

Here is the one-two punch:

If cold ocean water kicks up moisture into the air (and for those readers who are warmers, also slows the increase of CO2 into the atmosphere), AND cosmic rays hit the atmosphere, in essence seeding it, and cloud cover cools the planet…?

I’m not claiming any cooking of books. My understanding is that the missing data simply doesn’t exist. But regardless of WHY it’s missing, the fact that it IS missing, introduces a known warm bias.

Another concern I have is the difference between temperature, and heat content. Tropical air contains considerably more water, and therefore more energy per degree, than polar air. It seems to me that joules/cubic meter, or something similar, would be a much more useful metric than temperature. I sincerely have no idea how that would alter the global “averages.” But at least the numbers would be more meaningful.

REPLY: See this previous post I made on the subject

http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/03/08/putting-a-myth-about-uah-and-rss-satellite-data-to-rest/

“Some Norwegian reader here made the comment somewhere that these small sunspots would have been impossible to detect with the primitive instruments available during the Maunnder Minimum. Of course he’s right. The puny spots we’ve been seeing occasionally are insignificant. It’s like seeing one tiny bubble in a pot you’re waiting to see start boil. Cycle 24 has not started in my view.”

Definition of solar minimum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_minimum
“The date of the minimum is described by a smoothed average over 12 months of sunspot activity, so identifying the date of the solar minimum usually can only happen 6 months after the minimum takes place.”

If we apply a “Maunder minimum technology sunspot count adjustment” to the present Cycle 24 spot, to make the current counts consistent with that time, then most likely the total SC24 sunspot count so far would be zero.

I think it is quite likely that solar minimum is still months into the future.

Are you the Jean Meeus I think you are?
http://www.willbell.com/math/mc1.HTM
Fantastic work!

I used the theories in your book to simulate the solar orbit, which really has an interesting and very complex behaviour. I wonder if the cyclic behaviour could explain solar activity….

Screenshots of computed orbits
http://arnholm.org/astro/sun/sc24/sim1

The former two spellings would be, ahem, anomalous.

ba-dump bump!

I’ll be here all week.

http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/03/10/feb-2008-rss-global-temperature-anomaly-near-zero-and-in-good-agreement-with-uah/

I used the 0.080 since that was in the same column that Anthony used. I was going for consistency. I just checked the other 3 and they don’t have April yet.

About Sunspots, did Galileo or Wolf have teams of people checking the instruments at least hourly to make sure no sunspots would get missed?

John M Reynolds