Note: See also the 1997 regime change in global climate data by the same method, here
I’m happy to report that something I recognized and reported back in 2008 related to solar data has been independently confirmed by another source, and was a surprise when it showed up in my inbox two days ago.
Readers may recall that for some time I’ve been pointing out a strange anomaly in the Solar Geomagnetic Index that occurred in October 2005. In a story I wrote on Feb 13th, 2008 titled Where have all the sunspots gone? I plotted the Ap data and pointed out the event.
I wrote then:
What is most interesting about the Geomagnetic Average Planetary Index graph above is what happened around October 2005. Notice the sharp drop in the magnetic index and the continuance at low levels.
This looks much like a “step function” that I see on GISS surface temperature graphs when a station has been relocated to a cooler measurement environment. In the case of the sun, it appears this indicates that something abruptly “switched off” in the inner workings of the solar dynamo. Note that in the prior months, the magnetic index was ramping up a bit with more activity, then it simply dropped and stayed mostly flat.
Since then, we’ve seen announcements like this:
BREAKING – major AAS solar announcement: Sun’s Fading Spots Signal Big Drop in Solar Activity
Posted on June 14, 2011 by Anthony Watts
“If we are right, this could be the last solar maximum we’ll see for a few decades,” Hill said. “That would affect everything from space exploration to Earth’s climate.”
See the official press release here – “All three of these lines of research to point to the familiar sunspot cycle shutting down for a while.”
Dr. Sam Outcalt : Emeritus Professor of Physical Geography, University of Michigan sent me this graph two days ago, showing his application of Hurst Rescaling to the Ap Solar Magnetic Index data. Using that method, he has independently identified the “step function switch off” I reported in Feb 2008:
The major regime transition is at the maximum of the integral at 2005.71, which corresponds to October 2005, the same date I identified.
Clearly the sun entered into a magnetic funk then, and has yet to come out of it.
We live in interesting times.
For more on Hurst ReScaling, see this paper: SIO_HurstReScale
UPDATE: As I expected he would, Dr. Leif Svalgaard takes exception to this characterization of the identification of October 2005 being a regime changepoint, saying:
While I agree that the sun is going quiet, the ‘step change’ is spurious. It is mainly due to a sporadic, single magnetic storm in September 2005: http://hirweb.nict.go.jp/sedoss/solact3/do?d=2005%2c09%2c04 and here is the next rotation: http://hirweb.nict.go.jp/sedoss/solact3/do?d=2005%2c10%2c01 You can find many such steps.
Such step changes happens all the time: http://www.leif.org/research/Ap-1844-now.png They are just weather, not climate.
I don’t think his analogy holds promise, because after the step change the “climate” of the solar dynamo stayed low, and then produced the lowest value in the record going back to 1844. See Leif’s graph (click to enlarge) which I’ve annotated:
While this is akin to the sustained drop starting in early 1871, clearly this was something new in the entire record.If we use smoothing to remove what Leif describes as weather noise, and magnify, we can see how this looks to be unique in the last century of data:
While it could be argued that this was a “weather” event, the facts remain that:
- In the 14 months prior to Oct 2005, the Ap index was on the rise
- It was a very sharp drop spanning a little over a month.
- It has not recovered to the average values in the preceding 14 months since then.
- Weather events are usually short term dynamics. The 2 rotation periods of the sun Leif refers to aren’t capable of maintaining the step change for the years following October 2005.
- Following the event, the Sun produced the lowest Ap value in the record in Dec 2008.
- Projections by others, including Livingston, suggest the sun has entered into a quiet magnetic state.
While I defer to Dr. Svalgaard’s overall superior knowledge on the dynamics of sun, and agree there are many sharp transitions in the Ap record, this looks to me to be a step change event of merit based on the factors listed above. I’ve yet to see a fully convincing explanation that this was a spurious event rather than a regime changepoint. But, I remain open to seeing such an explanation.
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thats all good….but has there been any change in solar output
Very interesting, keep us posted please Anthony.
Recall your post well, & still refer to it & the “step function” you alluded to! The wonderful (not) Met Office are bleating on about the “Jet Stream” & how it has moved south with all the expertise & knowledge of a quack, they haven’t said a word as to why it has shifted other than it “does it sometimes” – reminds me of a pimply faced yoof who after I purchase some expensive puter prog or device that then goes on the blink (grrr)!!!
Congratuations to my cousins in the Virginian Colonies, for 4th July, & all that you have given the world, except for bubble gum & MacDonalds of course, but the rest, I thank you! 😉
I believe you wrote the story in Feb 2008, not 2005 as written..
REPLY: Yes, typo fixed, thank you. -A
Geomagnetic indices based on measurements within Earth’s magnetosphere have degree of input from the short changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, which it is thought (in my view wrongly) by some of the leading scientists that do not exists.
The main index of geomagnetic activity Aa, from which other derivations are made is a proxy for the strength and phase properties of the solar dynamo. Both Aa and the sunspot number SSN show an 11 year variation, however these variations are not the same (Feynman, 1986). Parts of the Aa index are associated with the toroidal and parts with poloidal solar magnetic field. The correlation between SSN and Aa is about 0.47.
Typo re dates near the beginning. Your report was 13th February 2008, not 2005. Otherwise fully agree. I have been doing my bit to try to educate people about the suns’ likely influence on the climate
“a story I wrote on Feb 13th, 2005”
Shouldn’t that be 2008?
My Explanation:
a) Hydrogen burning occurs on the surface of the Sun’s Core.
b) Hot Sun [more fusion], Core expands making more H available from the Radiative Zone.
c) When the amount of H becomes less available [near the Core’s surface] , the Core starts to shrink [less fusion] and the Sun becomes cooler.
d) Core shrinks until a new equilibrium is found [the Core is growing by fits and leaps -> it is the waste volume for burned H, that is, He].
e) Repeat the process.
Hot Sun [more fusion], massive inflowing H currents. Cool Sun [less fusion]. less inflowing H currents. Hot Sun, the H currents generate massive magnetic fields and produce Sun Spots. Cool Sun, the H currents are less, the magnetic field declines and, possibly, no Sun Spots.
During the Maunder Minimum, the Sun was cool for ~50 years. Faint traces of a 2×180 year cycle in the climate record [?? is there such a thing ??].
“Major regime transition” -> Sun cooling, core shrinking.
(Typo: 2nd para, story date was 2008 not 2005, inferred from the link. Later mention of date is OK)
Interesting times indeed. Is it that there are really rather a lot of these step functions switching on or off lately, or is it that we’re only just getting round to investigating them? You wait centuries for a step change, then a bunch of them all turn up together.
And how many modest step changes in its component parts does it take to flip a pseudostable system into a different state? Hmm, wish I hadn’t thought that.
@Steve C: Most likely these step changes are not independent…. they’re just various observed responses to the single “original” step change in the magnetosphere.
1. Alan the Brit says: July 4, 2012 at 4:01 am
Congratuations to my cousins in the Virginian Colonies, for 4th July, & all that you have given the world, except for bubble gum & MacDonalds of course, but the rest, I thank you! 😉
*********
I would point out that there has never been a war between two countries that have McDonalds. An extensive meta-study by the Jewett Institute of Serenity, Tranquility, and Peace has proven that these United States are bringing World Peace through McDonalds! It must be true: the consensus agrees!
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)
Typo?
In the last graph there seems to be a typo in the label that reads “1991.54”.
It seems that it should read “1999.54”.
Steve Garcia
REPLY: Yes, correct, knowing how Dplot works, the graph labels were manually done by Outcalt, not automatically generated. Fixed, thank you. – Anthony
@vuk
>The main index of geomagnetic activity Aa, from which other derivations are made
> is a proxy for the strength and phase properties of the solar dynamo.
You’ve got that backwards, Vuk. Aa is derived from the k indices, which are both measures of “disturbances” in the Earth’s magnetic field (see Refernce below). They are not measures of the “strength” of the solar magnetic field, but are analogous to the so-called “Richter” scale for earthquakes, in the sense that these indices measure ‘tremors’ or deviations in the Earth’s magnetic field.
The lowest k-index (= 0) corresponds to a deviation on the order of 5nT (nanoTeslas) or less, whereas the highest k-index (9, very rare) translates to a deviation of 500 nT or more. Since the Earth’s field is appoximately 50,000nT, you can see that the strongest geomagnetic disturbances correspond to a change of about 1%, or less, in the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field.
Typical daily readings are much smaller, but have observed and documented routinely since the mid 19th century. Yes, before the 20th century, before electonic magnetometers existed. The first measurements were made by observing a light beam deflected from a mirror riding on a compass needle!
As for the solar “proxy” you mention, I’m guessing that this is another one of your famous “correlations” which tend to be more numerlogy than science. The Aa index (as I shown above) doesn’t even measure the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field, so how can it measure the Sun’s?
Actually, there is a strong connection between these geomagnetic indices and solar activity in general. But it is coupled through the interaction of the Earth’s magnetosphere with the solar wind. So Anthony’s “step function” more likely reflects a change in the solar wind connection, and thus only indirectly correlated to solar activity.
😐
Reference:
http://www.ga.gov.au/oracle/geomag/geomagnetism_indices.jsp
“k index
The k index is a quasilogarithmic index of geomagnetic activity relative to an assumed quiet day curve for the recording site. k is a code from 0-9 that characterizes magnetic activity (0 being the least active field and 9 the most active field) over a 3 hour period.
aa index
The aa index is three hourly index of geomagnetic activity determined from the k indices scaled at two antipodal subauroral stations: Canberra Australia, and Hartland England. For each three hour interval, k indices measured at the two stations are converted back into amplitude. A three hour aa index is the mean of the northern and southern values, weighted to account for the small differences in the latitudes of the two stations.”
The major regime transition is at the maximum of the integral at 2005.71, which corresponds to October 2005, the same date I identified.
While I agree that the sun is going quiet, the ‘step change’ is spurious. It is mainly due to a sporadic, single magnetic storm in September 2005: http://hirweb.nict.go.jp/sedoss/solact3/do?d=2005%2c09%2c04 and here is the next rotation: http://hirweb.nict.go.jp/sedoss/solact3/do?d=2005%2c10%2c01 You can find many such steps.
vukcevic says:
July 4, 2012 at 4:22 am
Geomagnetic indices based on measurements within Earth’s magnetosphere have degree of input from the short changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, which it is thought (in my view wrongly) by some of the leading scientists that do not exists.
The indices can be accurately calculated using only solar wind data as input, so short-term changes in the Earth’s magnetic field have nothing to do with the indices. See page 5 of http://www.leif.org/research/IAGA2008LS-final.pdf or http://www.leif.org/research/Physics-based%20Long-term%20Geomagnetic%20Indices.pdf
Sometimes it is wise to listen to leading scientists who know what they talk about.
REPLY: Leif, thank you, I recall you giving this explanation before, but I am skeptical of it. I don’t see how such an event can show up in the Hurst ReScaling output unless it was a months to years long event. The fact is that the Ap output has been muted since then, and I struggle to understand how you can categorize that as spurious, especially with the Hurst ReScaling pointing it out too. But, I’m willing to listen. Please elaborate on how this storm managed to overcome 14 months of an upward trend in Ap in the preceding 14 months prior to October 2005. – Anthony
This looks more like a change in instrumentation than a change in solar activity to me. Are you sure it’s for real?
REPLY: I would agree – look for Occam’s Razor first, but there is no change in instrumentation on that date that I’ve found – Anthony
“… occurred in October 2005. In a story I wrote on Feb 13th, 2005 …”
Why does everyone assume a typo? I assumed that is means that Anthony has precognitive abilities.
The major regime transition is at the maximum of the integral at 2005.71, which corresponds to October 2005, the same date I identified.
Is akin to saying that the current heat wave is what global warming looks like. Weather is not climate.
For even more on Hurst rescaling and Hurst-Kolmogorov transitions in climate science, please see any of a raft of papers by Koutsoyiannis, e.g. google up:
Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics and uncertainty
I’m glad to see people are finally jumping on the bandwagon he has been pushing all by himself for several years now. If I had anything like the time required, I would be working on a paper that attempted to demonstrate that a generic feature of a chaotic dynamical model in sufficiently high dimensionality with internal random noise, projected onto a single degree of freedom, often exhibits the platform transitions discovered by Koutsoyiannis in hydroclimate processes and subsequently observed elsewhere. I continue to point out that Tisdale has an “instant paper” if he applies this analysis to his SST series, because it is obviously a perfect match, and since SSTs account for 70% of the Earth’s surface it is an even more powerful statement about warming or cooling than analyzing e.g. HadCRUT or GISS.
It even makes me want to revisit the issue of hidden variables in quantum mechanics. The projective geometry of high-dimensional dynamics wasn’t really computable the last time the question was really addressed some years ago, and I’ve never been convinced by some of the arguments for “true random” quantum processes. Especially lacking formal testing of the null hypothesis in a really, really good RNG tester (like the one I hope dieharder eventually becomes).
rgb
Well spotted. Pun intended.
Have a happy July 4th, O transatlantic brethren. If you ever think that you would like an apolitical Head of State, to keep Politics out of Patriotism, then I am sure we would consider your application to re-enter the aegis of the Crown, since a wee while has transpired since that unfortunate War of Independence. In the modern world, none of us are independent of anyone else any more …
Steamboat Jack says:
July 4, 2012 at 5:57 am
“I would point out that there has never been a war between two countries that have McDonalds. ”
Yes, making people fat, dumb and happy keeps them from wanting war.
Would it be possible for people to stop pointing out every damn typo, it’s getting ridiculous scrolling through comments. Or could the mods just not approve them?!
I would point out that there has never been a war between two countries that have McDonalds. An extensive meta-study by the Jewett Institute of Serenity, Tranquility, and Peace has proven that these United States are bringing World Peace through McDonalds! It must be true: the consensus agrees!
We must make haste and ensure that McDonalds opens in India as soon as possible, then — I’m certain that the country’s billion or so Hindus won’t mind a restaurant serving beefburgers. It would be very useful to tie the acceptance of, say a dozen McDonalds outlets in North Korea or Iran to any other sort of aid or accommodations too, wouldn’t you say? Perhaps Pakistan and Afghanistan could use a few as well? But how will we arrange for the Sunnis to have Sunni Mickey-D’s and the Shi’ia to have Shi’ia Mickey-D’s? A conundrum at best…
rgb
Interesting. I somewhat gather that the geomagnetic field affects the readings of the solar magnetosphere?
John Day > “there is a strong connection between these geomagnetic indices and solar activity in general. But it is coupled through the interaction of the Earth’s magnetosphere with the solar wind. So Anthony’s “step function” more likely reflects a change in the solar wind connection, and thus only indirectly correlated to solar activity.”
Thanks for the interpretation. I take your comment re-“change in solar wind connection” as possibly indicating change in frequency of polar aurora and amount of energy carried by solar wind into TOA.
If the sun doesn’t come out of this “magnetic funk” soon, we’re very likely to see a large and extended solar minimum, but only time will tell.