New Sunspot emerging – looks to be cycle 24

Yes, it looks as a 24 one.
A few days ago there were in the magnetogram dispersed concentrations of N and S that could have been interpreted as a weak swarm of 24s.
As we say in Greece, one swallow does not introduce spring.

Spaceweather.com is calling it a 24 spot.

It’s tiny!

Here is a blink-animation for the new SC24 (?) sunspot. The magnetic abnormality appeared in the frame at 2008-05-03 06:58. The sunspots appeared in the frame at 2008-05-03 20:46.
http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/8986/mdi20080504ld1.gif
A minimum of 3 sunspots can be discerned in some frames. In the last frame with sunspots, their size and number appears to be decreasing. I will update the blink-animation when more frames become available.
Mike
Note: To view using IE press the “F11” key to toggle between full screen and the normal IE display. To stop the animation, press the “Esc” key. To restart the animation press “F5”. The solar image is best viewed in full size, if using IE pass the pointer over the image and click if a magnifying glass is displayed with a “plus” sign in the center. The blink speed is one frame every 2.5 seconds with a 8 second delay on the last frame.

There have been very small SC24 magnetic fields almost every week for the last few months but the size of them is far too small to even get close to produce sunspots. The duration of those “micro” magnetic fields seems to last a very short time, 1 or 2 days.
Now, there is no doubt that SC24 has started to produce sunspots but the big question is, how long will it keep producing very tiny spots and be outnumbered by SC23? Does anyone have data or pictures available from the last transition between SC22 and 23? Did it also just produce very tine spots for a year until the big one started to appear?
Is this a normal transition, i.e. it starts with very tiny spots and then later as it accelerates it starts to produce big spots that lasts for more than a few days?

I think it is gone already:
http://solarscience.auditblogs.com/2008/05/04/sc24-i-must-be-cursed/

SIDC is calling it a Cycle 24 sunspot. The Sun is slowly waking up.
http://sidc.oma.be/products/presto/
A small sunspot group appeared today at latitude -28 degrees. This
tiny feature belongs to the new solar cycle and is the first one to
appear in the Southern hemisphere. No significant activity is expected
from this group. The solar wind speed is still elevated (500 km/s) but
without major impact on the Earth magnetosphere. We predict quiet to
unsettled geomagnetic conditions for one or two days, followed by quiet
conditions. We thus issued an all quiet alert.

The other Andrew – sorry. I usually type in my last name too but didn’t for some reason. Feel free to keep using your first name. I’ll make sure to use my full name from now on.
Anyway, it’s still visible on the current magnetogram image, though it’s almost gone from the continuum image.

At the risk of being accused of not wearing my aluminum foil helmet today (honestly I have it on), the MDI Continuum and MDI Magnetogram SOHO images have still not updated after over 11 hours at http://sohodata.nascom.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/data_query while current images of other data products are already available. Without the SOHO MDI images we are blind. For example we can’t accurately determine how long this new SC24 sunspot lasts.
I check the MDI history using Excel for both datasets and found that in the last 400 downloads (early February 2008); there have been outages which lasted as long as 2 days, 17 hours and 38 minutes! The sun has been so inactive that no one apparently cared.
System will only fail when the data is most critical!
The second I post this message the updates will become available.
I am making this post to insure an update.
Mike

Dumb question – I know the solar cycle business and sunspot deal. What I’m not clear on is what significance it has. Does it mean warmer, cooler, does the delay in starting the next cycle mean something? Maybe someone can explain or provide a link to a solar cycle primer.

Hey Anthony,
Check out:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/05/04/do0405.xml

It sure looks like the real deal. All I can say is late is better than never. I’m not looking forward to a cooling of any kind. I’ve gotten use to the mild winters, and the longer gardening seasons of the last 2 decades.
I can still remember vividly the long, seemingly endless winters of my childhood (Snow from and frigid temps from Thanksgiving to St Joseph’s Day in March or April).

The end of the last cycle has previously been observed to be 6-20 months from the first sunspot of the new cycle, with a mean of 11-12 months. (That is, it takes about a year from the time the first new cycle sunspot is observed, for the number of spots from the new cycle to outnumber the number of spots from the old cycle.
That should put the end of cycle 23 around Dec 08 / Jan 09. But there is really no way to forcast how quickly the new one will ramp up. You just have to observe what happens, and hindcast the official stop/start a couple of months latter.

Carsten Arnholm, Norway
As an amateur astronomer maybe you would know: Would a telescope at the time of the Maunder Minimum have been able to resolve sunspots this small?

You might get an idea of the size of what Galileo did see by looking at his sketches.
http://galileo.rice.edu/images/things/sunspot_drawings/ss603-l.gif
was done in June of 1613
http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/observations/sunspot_drawings.html

Awhile back the idea was floated that the recent bee die-offs may have been linked to solar activity. Here’s something new on the subject:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080502091421.htm

Re Paul Linsay

As an amateur astronomer maybe you would know: Would a telescope at the time of the Maunder Minimum have been able to resolve sunspots this small?

I’m not an astronomer of any sort but I would imagine that the duration of a sunspot would also play a part as to whether it would have been detected. In the past a spot would only be visible if the sun was not obscured by clouds. The smaller the duration the greater the chance that the sun would be obscured for the spots entire lifetime.

Hi,
SC24 start with the first spot. However we only reach minimum when the number of SC24 spots is greater than the number of SC23 spots. So the general discussion is when due we reach minimum? Make me wonder is the Maunder minimum had these very small spots and they just couldn’t see them.

http://www.heartland.org/pdf/22059.pdf
with more correlations of sunspot length with temperatures

OK kids, can we moderate the doom & gloom about the sun? The Little Ice Age took a while to really set in, first with the Sporer Minimum, then the Maunder, and the Earth eased back out of it after the Dalton. It takes a few half-amplitude solar cycles before cumulative effects would really show, just as other studies show longer-term 20th century trends in solar luminance correlate most with historical temperatures. The Earth’s sensitivity to solar flux appears to include a lag of about 5 – 8 years.
Anyone know how much average solar luminance decreased since 1990? Apparently this slight 17-year decline is seen as responsible for a “mere” -0.1 degrC change, or about 0.06 degrC per decade. Understood this is only in the context of steady, full-amplitude solar cycles of the 20th century, meaning periodic minima wouldn’t pull the average down as much.
Longer minima, in a lower-frequency & half-amplitude multi-cycle trend, on the other hand, would a more-significant cumulative effect, proportionately. There must be some data and formulas for this. I would expect a multiple of the -0.06 C/decade.
Shindell at NASA/GISS modeled this back in 2001 and found the Maunder would cause far-more colder continental winters.
The bottom line was that the diminished solar luminance slowed interzonal convection and increased La Nina frequency & a generally lowered heat budget which lead to weaker continent-warming ocean-borne weather fronts in wintertime. While the cooling was modest, the effects in continental
interiors were profound. Likewise SC Asia has a historical record of famine corresponding with declines in solar luminance.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/shindell_06/
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20011206/
“…They determined that a dimmer Sun reduced the model’s westerly
winds, cooling the continents during wintertime. Shindell’s model
shows large regional climate changes, unlike other climate models that
show relatively small temperature changes on an overall global scale.
Other models did not assess regional changes.”
Shindell’s study found a 0.3-0.4C GST change, which might be about right, compared to this -0.06 current changee. I suspect Shindell’s study, were it run again, would show a lower GST outcome, taking cosmic rays and ocean effects into account. The upshot would be either to make the continental temperature model outcome more consistent, colder, or both.
This model was run in 2001, so it probably didn’t include cosmic ray influences on cloud cover, ocean-air coupling, PDO, AMO, NAO, AO or bigger La Nina effects.
Even skeptics of cosmic ray influence admit CRF can account for as much as 25 percent differential in cloud cover between 20th century solar min & max. A 25 percent differential is not enough to do it all, but it’s a nice nudge either way.
I think it can be reasonably assumed that SC#25 will be a half-amplitude dud, and I think it’s fair to guess likewise SC#26. Solar activity changes of this magnitude evolve over the course of several decades, so this evolving downtrend may be with us for a good while.
But for the time being my guess is the sun’s dimming marks the onset of a moderate Dalton- or Sporer-like grand minimum. That seems to me more probable than a deep-chill Maunder.

Hey Old Construction Worker, I’m a middle-aged mechanic.
I used to completely be a complete believer in dangerous CO2-driven global warming after I saw shrunken glaciers in the Rockies in the 1980’s. Then I found out soot has been melting them, the Arctic & Kilimanjaro & started to wonder what was up. Then I saw Gore’s movie & realized we were being stampeded.
I think we need to send Al Gore on the mitigation mission to steer Apophis after it passes by in 2013. Doesn’t matter if Apophis will miss or not in 2039, we need Al Gore to be selected in consideration of his humanitarian heroism:
“Houston. We have a problem. The return booster won’t fire.”
“Roger that Apophis Base. We have studied the problem and we’ve determined that the booster is actually full of copies of AIT.”
“Sorry Houston. Could you repeat that last transmission?”
[silence]
“Apophis Base to Houston command, do you copy?”
[silence]
etc…
We’ll all remember him as a hero.