Sunspot Minimum May Be at Hand

3 06 2009

By Joseph D’Aleo ICECAP

The sun has become more active in recent days with cycle 24 spots in middle latitudes. See sunspot group number 11019 for group of red spots. This is slightly diminished since yesterday. The dark green areas are coronal holes out of which the solar wind escapes at higher velocity.

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See larger image here.

Peter Lawrence has a close up view of that sunspot posted on spaceweather.com.

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See larger image here.

There is a loop of the sunspots develop and rotate around the solar disk the last few days here.

This activity came late enough in the month of May, to keep the monthly number for May below the value of 14 months ago of 3.2 which it is replacing in the 13 month running mean. That means the solar cycle minimum can’t be earlier than November 2008, making it at least a 12.5 year long cycle 23. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Science, solar

A response to the IPCC

3 06 2009

I spoke at this conference in Washington DC yesterday, and presented preliminary findings of my surfacestations.org report which you can see here.

060209_Watts

I was also privileged to hear MIT’s Dr. Richard Lindzen give a presentation on the state of climate science today, as well as his views on Climate Sensitivity.

You can look at his powerpoint presentation here.

In addition, a significant new report was released, the NIPCC. It is a comprehensive rebuttal to the IPCC report.

Climate Change Reconsidered, the 2009 report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), is the report on global warming the United Nations’ climate panel should have written – but didn’t.

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The 880-page report, released June 2nd, 2009 at an international meeting in Washington DC of scientists and policy experts, rigorously critiques the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which concluded that harmful global warming “very likely” has been due to human activity in the release of greenhouse gases. The science behind that conclusion is soundly refuted in Climate Change Reconsidered, coauthored by Dr. S. Fred Singer and Dr. Craig Idso.

The full text of the report and related materials can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Announcements, climate_change

Air France Flight 447: A detailed meteorological analysis

3 06 2009

NOTE: This writeup is from an acquaintance of mine who wrote some powerful meteorological software, Digital Atmosphere, that I use in my office. He used that software (and others) to analyze the Air France 447 crash from the meteorological perspective.  h/t to Mike Moran – Anthony

by Tim Vasquez

Air France flight 447 (AF447), an Airbus A330 widebody jet, was reported missing in the equatorial Atlantic Ocean in the early morning hours of June 1, 2009. The plane was enroute from Rio de Janeiro (SBGL) to Paris (LFPG). Speculation suggested that the plane may have flown into a thunderstorm. The objective of this study was to isolate the aircraft’s location against high-resolution satellite images from GOES-10 to identify any association with thunderstorm activity. Breakup of a plane at higher altitudes in a thunderstorm is not unprecedented; Northwest Flight 705 in 1963 and more recently Pulkovo Aviation Flight 612 in 2006 are clear examples.

Back in the 1990s I did flight route forecasting for the Air Force. One of my assignments in summer 1994 was forecasting was the sector between Mombasa, Kenya and Cairo, Egypt for C-5 and C-141 aircraft. The Sudan region had tropical MCS activity similar to this with little in the way of sensor data, so this incident holds some special interest for me as one of our C-5s could easily have followed a very similar fate. Using what’s available to me I decided to do a little analysis and see if I could determine anything about the fate of AF447 and maybe through some circuitous, indirect means help give authorities some clues on where to look.

1. Reports and evidence

Reports indicate AF447 reported INTOL (S01 21.7′,W32 49.9′ or -1.362,-32.832) at 0133Z and was to proceed to TASIL (N4 00.3′,W29 59.4′, or +4.005,-29.990) in 50 minutes (a true track of 28.1 deg) (source) indicating that it flew high altitude route UN873 (see below).


Enroute High Altitude Caribbean and South America H-4, 30 AUG 2007 (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency)

Though the actual flight plan data was not accessible to me, this corresponds well with an actual flight plan found on the Internet for a Varig B767 from Rio de Janeiro to Frankfurt: Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : weather

The Interplanetary Magnetic Field: lowest point since 1913?

3 06 2009

David Archibald writes to tell me that the IMF has hit “rock bottom” and may go lower still. Watching the IMF is a good indicator of the activity of the Sun’s internal magnetic dynamo. Looking at this graph from Archibald, and Lief’s graph below one could conclude that the sun’s inner magnetics are quieter than any time in the last 90+ years.

First a bit of a primer to help our readers understand what the IMF is.

This is from SpaceWeather.com

During solar minimum the Sun’s magnetic field, like Earth’s, resembles that of an iron bar magnet, with great closed loops near the equator and open field lines near the poles. Scientists call such a field a “dipole.” The Sun’s dipolar field is about as strong as a refrigerator magnet, or 50 gauss. Earth’s magnetic field is 100 times weaker.

Steve Suess (NASA/MSFC) prepared this figure, which shows the Sun's spiraling magnetic field from a vantage point ~100 AU from the Sun.

During the years around solar maximum (2000 and 2001 are good examples) spots pepper the face of the Sun. Sunspots are places where intense magnetic loops — hundreds of times stronger than the ambient dipole field — poke through the photosphere. Sunspot magnetic fields overwhelm the underlying dipole; as a result, the Sun’s magnetic field near the surface of the star becomes tangled and complicated.

The Sun’s magnetic field isn’t confined to the immediate vicinity of our star. The solar wind carries it throughout the solar system. Out among the planets we call the Sun’s magnetic field the “Interplanetary Magnetic Field” or “IMF.” Because the Sun rotates (once every 27 days) the IMF has a spiral shape — named the “Parker spiral” after the scientist who first described it.

Here is another view of the Parker Spiral. Our own Leif Svalgaard had a hand in this I believe:

The heliospheric current sheet is a three-dimensional form of a Parker spiral that results from the influence of the Sun's rotating magnetic field on the plasma in the interplanetary medium.

The IMF goes through the floor

Guest Post by David Archibald Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Science, solar