On Climate Audit’s unthreaded comment forum, David Archibald noted some interesting facts about the solar cycle lengths and upcoming Solar Cycle 24, and provided the graph above.
Solar Cycle 20 was slightly longer than average at 11.6 years. The average solar cycle length from 1643 to 1996 is 11.4 years. Now that Dr Svalgaard has mentioned it, let’s talk about Solar Cycle 21. It was short at 10.3 years and hot (it started at the same time as the PDO shift in 1976) and was followed by a solar cycle 22 which was shorter again at 9.6 years and hotter. According to Friis-Christensen and Lassen theory, Solar Cycle 23 should have been hotter than Solar Cycle 22, and it was, even thought it is going to be a long one at about 13 years. There is plenty of correlation, all in our lifetimes. As for the physics, Hathaway found a correlation between Solar Cycle Length and the amplitude of the following cycle.
As for Solar Cycle 23 being almost done with, those are comforting words but the observational data suggests otherwise. Jan Janssens does it best – a recent plot is above. That suggests that we have a year to go and that Solar Cycle 23 is likely to be 13 years long. This is 3.4 years longer than Solar Cycle 22 and thus with mid-latitude temperatures responding at the rate of 0.7 degrees C per year of solar cycle length, Solar Cycle 24 will be 2.4 degrees cooler than the one we are still in.
The Financial Post has a story (Our Quiet Sun) that is echoing much of what Archibald is saying, but is quoting from other sources:
The sun, of late, is remarkably free of eruptions: It has lost its spots. By this point in the solar cycle, sunspots would ordinarily have been present in goodly numbers. Today’s spotlessness — what alarms Dr. Chapman and others — may be an anomaly of some kind, and the sun may soon revert to form. But if it doesn’t – and with each passing day, the speculation in the scientific community grows that it will not – we could be entering a new epoch that few would welcome.
Joe D’Aleo did an essay on IntelliCast on the possible consequences of a Solar Cycle 23 running out to 13 years, using some of the same things Archibald is saying:
Looking back at the full record of sunspot cycles, we can see this general behavior of short active cycles and longer, quiet ones. Successive 11 year cycles are different in their magnetic fields and the 22 year Hale cycle has in the past been related to some phenomena such as drought. Longer term cycles are apparent when you carefully examine the data. Very obvious from the long term plot of the 11 year cycles is the approximate 100 (106) year cycle. There is also a 213 year cycle. The last 213 minimum was in the early 1800s. The turn of each of the last 3 centuries has started with quiet long cycles with mid-century shorter, higher amplitude cycles. The quietest period was in the early 1800s (the Dalton Minimum). The 100 and 200 year minima are due the next decade suggesting a quieter sun ahead.
I’ll take Global Warming any day of the week and twice on Sundays over a Little Ice Age.
leebart:
1: aurora are due to the solar wind, thus not part of TSI, but both the solar wind and TSI follow the solar cycle [albeit TSI only so little, 0.1% or so]
2: a terawatt over the Earth’s surface is only 0.01 W/sq-meter, so not much
3: there is heating but up above the stratosphere
4: the upper layers of the atmosphere are heated from above, but the troposphere is heated from below
5: cosmic rays are much more energetic than auroral particles
6: Any round planet heated from the outside [even the Earth] has meridional flows transporting energy from equator to the poles.
[…] Solar Cycle 24 Could Be 13 Years Long – Cooler Times Ahead? [image] On Climate Audit’s unthreaded comment forum, David Archibald noted some interesting facts about the solar […] […]
Ow. Teach, my brain’s full. May I leave the room, please?
Seriously, and commenting on process rather than content (for obvious reasons), what a beautiful thread! Poste and riposte, serve and volley, and all with abundant good humour, humility and erudition. This is exactly what the Interweb was made for.
Paul – it’s nonetheless disturbing. Even without the end point effect, there is a break point.
Lief,
I’m a bit stumped on your 0.01 w/m^2, but perhaps that’s b/c I don’t have the right altitudes to get a “TOA” figure for that amt of energy. 80 km doesn’t seem right. If you don’t mind running that one by me or throw me a bone on the method to derive watts over surface area of atmosphere of “x” depth? I’ve tried to find these formulas before…
Events like Quebec ’89 when the aurora was almost on the ground still leads me to marvel at what the Earth endures from the sun.
http://www.crystalinks.com/aurora.html
Observing daytime aurora using NIR cameras:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2006GL028611.shtml
Dunno Leif.
If you say so!
😉
Solar flux is now at 66. It has been slowly decreasing over the few weeks. It is said that it can go as low as 50. What if it goes below that? If it does and it were a measure of blood pressure, one would begin to hear bells and whistles coming from the hospital room.
“So. Atlantic Anomaly” = Burmuda Triangle? Atlantis?
Tom in Texas
The South Atlantic Anomaly is a naturally occurring hole in the magnetosphere which allows the Van Allen Radiation belt to come into the actual atmosphere (where orbiting manned spacecraft actually fly), specifically the ionosphere. It’s an equatorial area that hovers just over the coast of Brazil & spacecraft electronics have to be switched off at times if the orbit crosses that area.
Over the course of a big particle storm (several hours) where the sun spews gobs of stuff at us from a vast prominence, a 10 hour, 10 terawatt storm spread over the 10M m-2 of the Earth’s surface comes to 0.55 w/m-2/sec (20kw/m-2 div. by. 36,000 sec). I don’t know what heat from that can filter down from 60 km above the upper troposphere, maybe some dissipation coefficient?
It’s enough that cameras onboard high-flying balloons (in the stratosphere?) can detect the NIR & IR of daytime aurora. I’d tend to think heat ignores barriers & I’ll have to look over that rule that it can’t wend its way downward…
Pamela:
Below 50? Isn’t that when we send Bruce Willis with a rocket-full of nukes or something?
leebert: 1 terawatt divided by the surface area of the Earth [as a disk] gives you 0.01 Watt per square meter. Then there are various factors of 4 to compensate for the Earth being a sphere etc, but I ignore all that to get an rough estimate. The auroral particles do not penetrate deeper than ~70 km or so. The aurorae is never ‘almost’ at the ground. what wreak havoc with electrical transformers are the currents near [and in] the ground and any conductors on the ground induced by the changing magnetic field due to currents up where the aurorae are.
Hi Leif,
I found my math error from a cut & paste from a website which had the surface as 510 Mm-2. Off by 1000. That’d be 510M Km-2. I’ve been sick for the past few days, foggy brained. Thanks for your patience! So, yes, that’d knock it down lower than 0.01 w/m2.
I recall the ionosphere nuke tests in the ’60’s that blew out equipment in Hawaii. Quebec ’89… perhaps they were just anecdotal accounts of the people saying it looked like the aurora was in the air, eyewitness accounts that the air glowed near the ground. Might’ve been ionization instead?
I saw ball lightning once as a kid. I was looking down the street and saw a brilliant searing ball zipping down the cross street. After it zipped past the stop sign it let out one helluva boom. It might’ve just been the after flash effect of visual phosphenes, but at the time it seemed the air had a purplish hue.
“except that it is always good , regardless, to be prudent and not squander resources, etc.” Leif
Leif,
You are a good scientist and what you say above is sound advice. The devil is in the detail of how this is implemented. Should this be left to what is left of the free market and individual choice or should the government with the advice of “experts” dictate this?
Oh, remove the quote marks from “experts”. I do not doubt their expertise, narrowly defined.
That would be off by a million, wouldn’t it? it Mm is millimeter, and Km is kilometer. 1 meter is 1000 milimeters, and 1 kilometer is 1000 meters.
Jeff,
You’re a funny guy!
Of course Mm (mixed case) meant “Million meter” vs. “M Km” for Million Kilometer.
They don’t pay me to type. Although I suppose it’s enough Leif is paying with his sanity indulging me in aurorae talk.
Jeff Alberts, you have succumbed to unit confusion. Mm is not millimeters but Million meters. However, leebert may have been confused also. 510 Mm-2 is 510 times an area a million meters by a million meters. This is the same as 510 times an area a thousand kilometers by a thousand kilometers. This is the same as 510 million square kilometers (510M Km-2, Leif’s figure). I think leebert’s error was in interpreting 510 Mm-2 as 510M m-2. See the difference?
Low solar output is disappointing. I was hoping to get a grant to sell refigerators to eskimos and have Al Gore help me to invent a CO2 furnace.
Alex: Good eye.
And of all the horrible details! W/out a semantic standard handy “Mm-2” vs. “M m-2” look a heckuva lot the same to my old eyes.
I can quickly surmise what “M km-2” means, but “Mm-2” is obviously not a convention I’ve seen before.
Call it a parsing error, but as old Dick Nixon would say, “Expletive Deleted!”
Hey – I see a sunspeck! It may not last long, there isn’t much magnetic support. Low latitude, I forget what the magnetic field is supposed to look like, but probably yet another last gasp from cycle 23. Yawn.
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/mdi_igr/512/
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/mdi_mag/512/
Leebert and Alex, thanks for the correction. I aint very edumacated.
There does appear to be evidence for a solar cycle interruption. (See comments below.)
Based on recent research (Tinsley, Yu, Palle, Svensmark, Shaviv, and so on.) a solar magnetic cycle interruption will result in long term higher GCR (Galactic Cosmic Rays) levels. The research I have seen shows that the increased ions produced by higher levels of GCR, will increase the amount of clouds over the oceans (atmosphere above the ocean is ion poor as compared to the atmosphere above the continents, as the continental rock is slightly radioactive.) More clouds colder planet, less clouds warmer planet.
Comments:
There were three recently published papers that predicted a solar magnetic cycle change to a Dalton or Maunder like minimum, for cycle 24: one analyzed past solar barycentre motion which correlates with deep solar magnetic cycle minimums, a second based on an analysis of the paleo cosmogenic isotopes (again that correlate with deep solar cycle minimums), and a third based on a physical model.
The following is the 2004 paper that predicts the sun is heading towards a Maunder minimum based on an analysis of the paleo record of solar activity.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2004ApJ…605L..81B
This is the 2003 paper that predicts a solar cycle minimum based on a physical model.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003SPD….34.0603S
This is the 1987 Solar barycentre motion paper: Prolonged minima and the 179-yr cycle of the solar inertial motion by R.Fairbridge and J. Shirley
http://www.springerlink.com/content/w57236105034h657/
The solar barycentre motion theory hypothesizes that specific motions of the sun about its barycentre, interrupts the formation of the magnetic ropes at the solar tacholine (Tacholine is the interface to solar radiative zone and convection zone.) With the barycentre hypothesis a Maunder minimum is an interruption to the solar magnetic cycle as opposed to a slow down.
William: what do you mean by a solar cycle ‘interruption’? That the magnetic polarities don’t reverse? If so, observations show that solar cycle 24 does have the expected reversed polarities.
This is only a theory, of course, just as is the prevailing but nonetheless theoretical solar nuclear furnace core supposition.
Overwhelming and diverse evidence strongly suggests there is no nuclear fusion taking place in the sun’s core.
Instead, the sun, like its dormant companion Jupiter has a large planetary core surrounded by an abyssal sea of liquid hydrogen, metallic at the point it impinges upon the terra firma core.
Above the liquid hydrogen sea is a layer of hydrogen gas, all of which is encapsulated by the relatively thin, roiling plasmasized photospheric sheath. The predominant reaction taking place in the photosphere is molecular hydrogen being converted to atomic hydrogen and back to molecular again under the influence of immense electrical forces.
The only fusion taking place in the sun is in the photosphere where fresh molecular hydrogen gas breaches through the photosphere we call a sunspot. In the process of the freshly emerging hydrogen being converted from molecular to atomic and back again, it becomes entrained in powerful concentric magnetohydrodynamic flows that can be described as nothing less than a natural solar cyclotron!!
One need only examine the highest resolution images of a sunspot from the 1 meter Swedish Solar Telescope at Las Palmas in the Canary Islands for confirmation that below the clearly defined photosphere is nothing more than a dark gaseous interior! http://www.astro.su.se/groups/solar/solar.html
I have a theory as to what causes sunspots that is inextricably interwoven with the above theory of the sun’s actual composition.
[…] back to the bizarro propaganda on Senator Inhofe’s website. It led instead to a blog called wattsupwiththat, where there appears a seemingly intelligent discussion about solar cycles that have the power to […]