Alert reader Andrew writes:
“I was just looking at the SOHO images and is it just me or does it look like there’s a sunspot developing in the lower left quadrant? If so, would this still be a cycle 23 spot given its low latitude?”
It appears that a new spot is indeed emerging, and unless I’m dyslexic about the polarity it looks as if this is the first cycle 24 spot in the southern hemisphere.
Compare it to the last cycle 24 spot, in the northern hemisphere:
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/04/13/second-cycle-24-spot-a-tiny-tim-spot/
Note the when crossing to the southern hemisphere, magnetic polarity reverses and you cross the equator and this spot is reversed from the polarity of the last cycle 24 spot in the northern hemisphere.
Michelson Doppler Image (MDI):
Magnetogram:
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Houston We Have A Problem!
The SOHO MDI Continuum & MDI Magnetogram imaging systems are not updating, as the Date/Time stamps on the following eight SOHO products indicates.
20080504_1900_eit171_1024.jpg
20080504_1925_eit195_1024.jpg
20080504_1906_eit284_1024.jpg
20080504_1919_eit304_1024.jpg
20080504_1854_c2_1024.jpg
20080504_1842_c3_1024.jpg
20080504_0505_mdiigr_1024.jpg
20080504_0512_mdimag_1024.jpg
As of this post the last MDI Continuum & MDI Magnetogram downloads were over fifteen hours ago.
The following graphic shows the delays between MDI Continuum & MDI Magnetogram downloads during 2008. With the number of Tiny Tim SC24 sunspots we are seeing, could one have slipped through unnoticed through the gaps which the following graphic identifies.
http://img258.imageshack.us/img258/6788/sohomdidelaymy9.gif
Mike
REPLY: It’s the weekend, perhaps they are short staffed for some reason. No need to panic yet.
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).
SWO # is 13.
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/alerts/solar_indices.html
Carsten Arnholm, Norway (08:45:37) :
“I imaged it myself today (from Norway), using an 8-inch Schmidt Cassegrain and a webcam, plus white light solar filter. It is a stack of about 600 single frames.
http://arnholm.org/astro/sun/sc24/sc24_spot_20080504_1010ut.jpg”
Nice job, though I can’t think of any other sunspot image I’ve seen where someone has gone through that much effort to photograph it. Maybe next time you’ll be able to split the penumbra and umbra – I imagine this was all penumbra.
Michael Ronayne (09:52:47) :
“… we can’t accurately determine how long this new SC24 sunspot lasts.”
Okay guys. It’s 2008 and we’re looking at sunspots that Galileo never could have seen without 300 more years of progress and we’re trying to make sunspot counts so we can compare them with past centuries. Perhaps James Hansen would be willing to come up with an adjustment that boosts past numbers so we can compare things with today.
Measuring the life time of sunspots is interesting – we happily burble on about “Hurricane Days, “Heating Degree Days,” and I’ll talk your ear off about “Snow Depth Days.” The summed sunspot counts over time sort of do that, but when we’re dealing with spots that don’t have the decency to last an entire day or Solar rotation, it does leave a pretty bad error signal, at least percentage-wise. Perhaps we need a better measurement of size too instead of giving a boost by counting groups of spots too.
By the time SC24 ramps up, I’ll probably be a much bigger fan of the 10.7 cm radio flux as a measurement of solar activity as that helps account for size, duration, and invisible activity.
Oh – while I have the floor, the pages hanging off of http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/ has NOAA’s “Prediction Panel’s” April 2007 forecast. There are pages saying they would update things in a year, I asked about that last Friday and got a response from the media contact saying conditions haven’t changed and that a forecast would be out a year after SC24 gets going.
There may be a bit of a disconnect between documents I see and those the SWPC deals with, but I’ll conclude that they have no better idea of what’s going on than we do. I was kind of waiting for the 2008 report before getting interested in climatology again, but in February I realized I had waited long enough and interesting things had started happening. I have no idea if anything other than the graphs will be updated soon.
– Ric
While a sunspot is interesting, it is IMO, not the correct measure to use for the sun’s affect on climate. I believe the magnetic field to be important, which during a quiet sun, allows atmospheric disturbances on earth to occur that play a significant role in water vapor development and planetary cooling. Even flares, big ones, may not be the measure we should be looking at as far as climate goes. The more active the sun gets, the more magnetic field it generates. The magnetic field generated by an active sun keeps us wrapped in an atmosphere that tends to warm us up and trap trace gases that feeds our plants. I believe we have been in a quiet cycle 23/cycle 24 minimum for quite some time and have been hit hard with cosmic rays.
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.
The sunspot has been assigned the number 993 but SIDC is not tracking it and it is over 24 hours old. Still no MDI updates.
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/forecast.html
IA. Analysis of Solar Active Regions and Activity from 03/2100Z
to 04/2100Z: Solar activity was very low. New Region 993 (S29E27)
emerged on the disk during the period as a small, simple Bxo Beta
group. The region has a new cycle magnetic configuration and
appears to be growing slowly.
Mike
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?
Anthony,
I am not panicking Mt. Wilson is on the job with paper and pencil reporting on #993. Apparently they work on weekends. I just can’t participate in all the fun!
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~obs/images/cur_drw.jpg
ftp://howard.astro.ucla.edu/pub/obs/drawings
No MDI sighting yet and we are coming up on 24 hours.
SIDC is now tracking #993 which is now over 36 hours old, if it is still there. I wonder is SIDC closes for the weekend?
Mike
That’s what I asked last itty-bitty spot.
I don’t even know yet what the number is. Do these “count”? what’s the total?
Paul Linsay (16:52:52) :
“Would a telescope at the time of the Maunder Minimum have been able to resolve sunspots this small?”
Not a chance. Galileo’s telescopes were barely able to resolve the rings on Saturn. In a modern telescope amateurs might own Saturn is wonderful jewel in the sky – oblate disk with elliptical disk for the rings. Traces of texture on the planet, fairly easy to see the Enke division in the rings. Saturn’s rings are about 40 arc-seconds across, the Sun is about 1800, I’d guess those Tiny Tims are about 5. With all the turbulence during daytime, I’m not sure Carsten could see the spot well with direct viewing, that’s one reason his image is a stack of 600 separate images.
See http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/images/Questar/saturn.html
for some Saturn images from an over-achieving small (3.5″ aperture) scope.
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
@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?”
Look up the drawings of people like Jan Hevelius, who observed sunspots at that time. I don’t think they would have detected it. I used a 60mm apochromatic refractor (i.e. pretty sharp optics), but it was very hard to see it visually, even when I knew it should be there. I saw it with some difficulty.
Granted, the seeing wasn’t ideal, but all in all I doubt that this spot would have been detected during the Maunder minimum.
So if we are comparing with Maunder minimum sunspot counts, I think we should be careful jumping to quick conclusions. The minimum could be many months into the future still.
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
Back to the Nature report,
Germany’s leading tabloid – Bild – now reports that according to the Leibnitz Institute:
“The earth is now entering a natural cold phase, possibly caused by fluctuations in solar energy. For the time being this effect is neutralising manmade global warming from greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide). But after that, the experts warm, dangerous global warming will resume.”
http://www.bild.de/BILD/news/vermischtes/2008/05/05/erd-erwaermung/macht-pause,geo=4445760.html
I don’t recall Keenlyside et. al. mentioning anything about solar energy fluctuations in their press release. Are they recognising the sun is now a factor?
The SOHO “realtime” page hasn’t updated since before I went to bed, so I took my telescope out for a peek. Couldn’t see a spot, except for lotsa crud on the eyepiece. (No, there’s no chance of confusing the two – eyepiece crud is stationary, sunspots jump around a lot at the magnification I was using.) I don’t think I’ve ever looked at a spotless sun before, not much reason to most days.
There’s a good chance I wouldn’t have seen it at its best, anyway.
Anthony can answer most of the recent questions better than I, but he stays very busy, so I’ll take a swing at a few which have elicited no response.
Significence:
The primary interest in sunspots is by the radio communications and electric utility sectors. Effects on climate are a new area of interest, and all the effects have yet to be observed, much less docu,mented. The sun bathes the earth in different kinds of particles, radiation at wavelengths from very long (acoustic frequency range electromagnetic) to beyond UV, and maybe more which I don’t know about. The radiation is fully formed electromagnetic, see Maxwell’s equations. The component electric and magnetic are easier to explain to people, and thus the emphasis on one or the other in media reports.
Climate effects:
Which of all these affect climate? Still under debate.
So far, EVERY (recorded) sunspot cycle has been different from every other, making forecasting shall we say, difficult. And, since the raw numbers are so erratic, a cumulative one year smoothed number is used to quantize the data, so even “real time” information is 6 months old.
SOHO:
On the SOHO images, remember the earth is turning under the LaGrange point, and different earth stations receive the images at different times; loss of one ground station will put a big hole in the data, and I don’t know where station outages are reported, or even if they are.
Inter-cycle counts:
The question about the characteristics of the 22/23 crossover keeps arising. I was on a busy travel schedule during that time, and tracked only the gross smoothed number. I remember getting to Guam, turning on receivers and thinking all the antennas were down, since NO signals were present. Turned out to be one of the flares which had erupted after I left home. Someone needs to see if one of the solar observatories (Big Bear, Sunspot, [?]in Chile) has the detailed records of that time period. They were taken, but who archived them? And where? Sorry, I do not have that information.
Count adjustments:
There are ongoing calculations trying to determine what the present numbers mean in terms of the very early observations. I believe this was discussed and several leads to specifics appeared in this blog last year.
ANTHONY:
You’re going to have to start a Category for Sunspots and make sure the earlier articles get properly tagged. Just in case you need something to do.
George M.
REPLY I’ll add it to the pile
Re Paul Linsay
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.
Interesting, but really another “Tiny Tim” that may well not have been noticed back during the Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1715. They certainly would not have known the magnetic polarity of the spots back then.
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.
A small reminder that the length of the sun cycle is inversly correlated with temperature:
Look at fig 13 in http://nzclimatescience.net/images/PDFs/archibald2007.pdf
There are more of these simple plots, but I do not have the link. I think he presented them at the conference in march.where people have records for two centuries of both temperature and number of sunspots and the length of the cycles. Nothing fancy, but consistent. The longer the cycle the colder the next period.
BTW Soho has updated the magnetic view. The spot is still there.
http://www.heartland.org/pdf/22059.pdf
with more correlations of sunspot length with temperatures
The MDI Magnetogram image updated after 33 hours but there is no update for the MDI Continuum image as yet and that is is the one which counts.
Mike
Who let Evan Jones out?
Over on El Reg on the Tale of Two Thermometers thread at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/02/a_tale_of_two_thermometers/comments/ Evan went British, paraphrasing G&S with “Not to mention that solar cycle 24 is the very model of a modern major minimum.”
Jolly good, ol’ chap!
David Archibald’s paper presented at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in New York is a most cogent discussion of the implications the delayed onset of solar cycle 24. See http://www.heartland.org/NewYork08/proceedings.cfm . One can view his PowerPoint presentation at this site – it can be found about halfway down the page under Monday, March 3, 2008, 2:15 PM, Panels, Track 2: Climatology. The presentation is an update of the one he made at the June 2007 Lavoisier Group’s Workshop in Melbourne titled “Rehabilitating Carbon Dioxide” which can be found at http://www.lavoisier.com.au/papers/Conf2007/Archibald2007.pdf . Fans of Dr. Hansen shouldn’t miss slide #32