In my post from yesterday, I highlighted a paragraph from a NASA press release which touched on one of the final findings of the soon to be ended Ulysses spacecraft mission to study the sun:
“Ulysses ends its career after revealing that the magnetic field emanating from the sun’s poles is much weaker than previously observed. This could mean the upcoming solar maximum period will be less intense than in recent history. “
A few months ago, I had plotted the Average Geomagnetic Planetary Index (Ap) which is a measure of the solar magnetic field strength but also daily index determined from running averages of eight Ap index values. Call it a common yardstick (or meterstick) for solar magnetic activity.
Click for a larger image
I had noted that there was a curious step function in 2005, almost as if something had “switched off”.
Today, since it is fathers day, and I get to do whatever I want, I chose to revisit this graph. Later I plan to take my children to launch model rockets, but for now, here are some interesting new things I’ve found.
First, I’ve updated the original Ap graph to June 2008 as you can see below.
Click for a larger image
Source data, NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center:
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/weekly/RecentIndices.txt
As you can see, the Ap Index has continued along at the low level (slightly above zero) that was established during the drop in October 2005. As of June 2008, we now have 32 months of the Ap hovering around a value just slightly above zero, with occasional blips of noise.
Since it is provided in the same dataset, I decided to also plot the smoothed Ap Index. I had noted to myself back in February that the smoothed Ap Index had dropped to minus 1.0. I figured it was just an artifact of the smoothing algorithm, but today that number remains there, and there doesn’t appear to be any change even though we’ve had a bit of noise in March that put the Ap Index back up to 10 for that month.
I also plotted my own 24 month smoothing window plot, shown in magenta.
Click for a larger image
I find it curious that the smoothed value provided by SWPC remains at -1. I figure if it is a software error, they would have noted and fixed it by now, and if they haven’t then perhaps they are standing by the number. Odd. One possibility may be that they are using a 12 month fixed window, instead of a moving window month to month. If so, then why show the -1.0 data values? Put nulls — in the dataset.
UPDATE: Astute reader Jorma Kaskiseiväs points out something I missed. The explanation is in the header for the dataset file, a short note: # Missing data: -1″. I was looking in the companion readme file for an explanation. Thanks for pointing this out. Surprising though that SWPC does not use a running average. Easy to do as I’ve shown.
While I was searching for something that could explain this, I came across this plot from NOAA’s NGDC which was used to illustrate solar storm frequency related to sunspots:
Click for original source image, a larger plot is here via FTP link.
But what I found was most interesting was the data file they provided, which had the number of days in a year where the Ap Index exceeded 40. You can view that data file yourself here via FTP link. The accompanying readme file for the data is also available here.
What is most striking is that since 1932, there have not been ANY years prior to 2007 that have zero data. The closest was 1996:
1996 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1
———————————————————–
YEAR JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC TOTAL
———————————————————–
2005 3 0 2 1 3 2 2 2 3 0 0 0 18
2006 0 0 1 2 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 5
2007 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2008 0 0 0 0 0 0
Now we have almost two years.
Here is my plot of the above dataset:
Click for a larger image
I also decided to plot the 10.7 centimeter band solar radio flux, also a metric of solar activity. It is in the same SWPC dataset file as the Ap Index, in columns 8 and 9. Oddly the smoothed 10.7 CM flux value provided by SWPC also has dropped precipitously and stayed there. I also provided my own 24 month wind smoothed value which is plotted in magenta.
Click for a larger image
Like the smoothed Ap Index, it has also stayed that way a few months. NOTE: The data past Dec 2007 on the blue line from SWPC is not valid. The smoothed 24 month window is.
Either way it appears we continue to slide into a deeper than normal solar minima, one not seen in decades. Given the signs, I think we are about to embark upon a grand experiment, over which we have no control.
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Johnnyb (07:45:26) :
“. . . on a political level I believe that it is prudent to pursue a policy of no regrets. . . .”
You display much wisdom in your comments, but often it is difficult to find a policy of no regrets. In the past I favored a carbon tax if we could get rid of some inefficient taxes — like the double taxation on corporate income — or if it could help in the transition of social security to personal accounts. However, current oil prices have undermined my support for a carbon tax. We probably should be using coal rather than sending wealth (and future value-added activities) to foreign producers of oil. It is not a stretch to say that those oil producers tend not to be our friends, and we are enriching them to pursue anti-American agendas Therefore, it seems to be prudent at the present time to use our coal rather than their oil.
Leif Svalgaard (04:07:04) :
I can accept your “model” as a hypothesis .
It could work but has to agree with the data. If I were getting serious about this I would go and compare the magnetogram numbers with the sunspot numbers over the SOHO years. The correlation should be there, sunspot cycles with fewer visible sunspots should have more magnetic spots.
I still do not see why the number of sunspots/magnetic-disturbances would be approximately constant, (or even the integral over a sunspot cycle) but I accept that the sun dynamics is not known well enough and this can be a working hypothesis.
Some humour if I may:
http://web.mac.com/sinfonia1/Global_Warming_Politics/A_Hot_Topic_Blog/Entries/2008/6/11_Every_Environmental_Report_Ever….html
dennis ward (23:42:42) says: “The only thing that will stop man-made global warming is a reduction in the number of humans.”.
However, in my opinion there may be more important issues. In the Dharavi slum of Mumbai the population density is something like one million people in a 2/3 square mile area. With densities like that surely the world can eventually maintain more than 15, 30, or 60 billion humans with a standard of living equivalent to the unnaturally elegant levels suggested by the fact that in the Dharavi slum the following is true.
… Even in the smallest of rooms, there is usually a cooking gas stove and continuous electricity.
… Many residents have a small colour television with a cable connection that ensures they can catch up with their favourite soaps. Some of them even have a video player.
An excellent image that shows some of the benefits of high population density is show here:
http://img2.travelblog.org/Photos/1449/48836/f/267564-Dharavi-Slum-Mumbai-0.jpg
‘“Never mind that AGW has be disproven, we’ll still need to limit carbon output to try to protect the world as we know it.” is what the AGW proponents will say.’ Jason
“What will the world look like after a third war world after the economic devastation caused by stupid environmental laws?” is a good response
make that “third world war” instead of “third war world” which has interesting semantic possibilities, none the less.
So how come that temperatures ROSE from 1985 to 1998 when the sun ’s activity DECLINED?
From earlier than that, actually. Several of the great oceanic-atmospheric cycles (AMO, PDO, NAO, AO, AAO) went from cool phase to warm phase during that time. (AO went “warm” in 1995.)
This would seem to account for a good part of it.
Not only that, but it appears, according to McKitrick, Michaels (2007), and LaDochy et al (Dec. 2007), and laterally supported by Yilmaz, et al. (2008), and LeRoy et al (1999), that the latest ride in temperatures has been exaggerated by about twofold. The reason postulated for this is surface station site violation, which accelerated greatly since 1980.
Normal 22-year solar cycles appear to have a +/- 0.1ºC effect on global temperatures. A major solar minimum may have a more drastic effect. And baseline solar activity may create an underlying trend.
There may be a combination of effect, including CO2, but the CO2 effect would be very slight in the absence of IPCC-assumed positive feedback loops from water vapor and decreased albedo.
The Aqua satellite shows (so far) negative, not positive feedbacks: Little increase in ambient vapor, but an increase in low level clouds which has a double effect of washing the water out of the atmosphere and increasing albedo. This would explain the slight downward trend in ocean and atmospheric temperatures over the last decade.
But there would appear to be a lot of wheels within wheels going on here.
Why is this so difficult to accept or understand?
For CO2 to have a major effect, one must rely on the IPCC feedback loop theory. But if there is no positive feedback from other source, triggered by CO2, then CO2 increase has very little effect.
johnnyb:
“A far simplier and perhaps more beneficial approach would be to create a tax on coal and oil which would get progressively larger as time goes on. I’m no fan of taxes, but I like Taxes much better than increasing consumer costs through legislation while forcing them to buy an inferior set of goods for more money, wind and solar are perfect examples of this. While a Tax could be used to balance the budget and slow the great fall of the dollar, and might someday even be used to pay down the debt that our politicians insist on saddling our future generations with.”
Doesn’t work that way.
Here in Britain we experience first-hand the effects of extortionate ‘carbon’ taxes (aka fuel tax, VED etc) The more these taxes rise, the more the cost of goods and services increases. And does the govt use any of those taxes to reduce debt? Noooo, they use it as an excuse to borrow even more.
With all the discussion around the possibility of a new Dalton or even Maunder minimum I thought it would be useful to see what happened to temperatures in England at those times. I extracted the data from the Hadley site http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/ for the mean temperatures and plotted the values for the four seasons. The one thing which stood out was the very small change in the summer temperatures compared to the other seasons. If you want to see the picture this is the link http://www.holtlane.plus.com/images/cet_mean.jpg
I just heard on another site that the Ap actually just went up above 20 again. Is this true?
REPLY: Hourly/daily Ap may very well change in spikes. The plot above was for monthly Ap which has such short term elements filtered.
Good observation Oldjim. Summer temps may not vary much but I’ll bet the growing season was MUCH shorter during Dalton. England depends on spring and fall temps, as does much of the world, to squeeze out produce. If those get cut short by hard and long winters, we will be in trouble.
anna: you are completely missing the point. It does not matter what the sun is doing. As long as there is a change in contrast, there will be a change in visibility and an undercount [never an overcount: we can’t count what is not there]. Nothing to do with my ‘model’ or ‘hypothesis’. These were just for illustration, but I realize now, that they did not make it easier for you. Let me construct a numeric case of three solar cycles where I give for each year a magnetic region count C , a visibility factor F, and the resulting sunspot number S = F * (10 C + 10 C) = F * (20 C). The second 10 is under the assumption that each region contains 10 magnetic poles.
1 0 1 0
2 1 1 20
3 2 1 40
4 4 1 80
5 5 1 100
6 4 1 80
7 3 1 60
8 2 1 40
9 1 1 20
10 0 1 0
11 0 0.5 0
12 1 0.5 10
13 3 0.5 30
14 4 0.5 40
15 5 0.5 50
16 4 0.5 40
17 3 0.5 30
18 2 0.5 20
19 1 0.5 10
20 0 0.5 0
21 0 0.1 0
22 1 0.1 2
23 2 0.1 4
24 4 0.1 8
25 4 0.1 8
26 3 0.1 6
27 3 0.1 6
28 2 0.1 4
29 1 0.1 2
30 0 0.1 0
You may be able to see that although the cycles have the same approximate [not exact] variation of magnetic regions, the sunspot numbers [the 4th] column are vastly different, because the visibility is different because the contrast is different because the temperature is different. I’m not saying that the region count is constant. I’m saying that even if it were constant, the sunspot number would be different. Comparing sunspot count and magnetograms is less direct than the direct measurement of contrast by Livingston and Penn, but with a cycle or two more measurements that would be an interesting exercise [although hardly necessary – if the spots actually do disappear]. For the longer period we know from cosmic ray radionuclide measurements that the magnetic cycle was still operating during the Maunder minimum, yet the sunspot number was zero. I’m not advocating anything. I said: if L & P are correct, then …
Lastly, if you at this point still don’t get it, then I would not know how to explain it any better. Maybe someone else could…
Steve: you can find one theory here: http://www.leif.org/research/Percolation%20and%20the%20Solar%20Dynamo.pdf
A different one [but with same result and same rationale] here: http://www.leif.org/research/jcc5.pdf
Anthony: about your ‘drop’ in Ap in October 2005, there is nothing unusual about that change. Here http://www.leif.org/research/Ap%20Bartels%20Rotation%20Plot.pdf is a plot of the whole Ap-series.
Pierre Gosselin (10:50:56) :
As it’s a lagging indicator of continental ice, and, has been on an ever flattening decaying exponential since the great melt, I am greatly concerned. We’ve been reading now for a while about increased volume / mass on Greenland and Antarctica. I hope it’s only a small downturn in MSL, and not the beginning of a steep decline. You know what that would certainly mean if it’s more than a short term inflection.
RE: Pamela Gray (13:04:10) :
In many places there were certainly late starts. The key will be when climatic fall arrives. 2006 it arrived in many places in August. Last year in Western NOAM it hit at the end of July. Chances are, we’ll have another early Fall this year.
It appears that the Ap for today shot up into the 20’s…(solarcycle24.com).
REPLY: Hourly/daily Ap may very well change in spikes. The plot above was for monthly Ap which has such short term elements filtered.
The sun, no spots
There should be lots!
Alas! So few,
We thought we knew
So much, and now
We don’t know how
The CO2 just cannot do
What it was once supposed to do.
Let it RAIN! Oh,
Failing that, a big volcano.
CK, LOL!
I like dramatic weather too. This boring sunshine in Tucson is KILLING me.
Austen
I’ve seen the quote in relation to commercial greenhouses that by mid-morning the CO2 content of the air will drop to 150ppm and plant growth will cease. If CO2 content drops to 90ppm photosynthesis stops. To counteract this. commercial growers will install a CO2 generator which will keep the CO2 content up around 1000 or 1200ppm, so provided they can supply the energy, (through sunlight), and keep the plants fed with water and nutrients they will grow much more.
Plants take energy, water, nutrients and CO2 and turn them into complex carbohydrates and oxygen. Animals will eat the plants and turn them into the complex proteins and carbohydrates they need to grow, and burn some of the carbon in oxygen to provide them with energy. This happens from the scale of phyto plankton and zoo plankton to giant redwoods and blue whales.
The idea that the tiny amount of CO2 we generate by burning fossil fuels is pollution is totally ludicrous, yet people who should know better continue to trot it out. Crazy.
(And don’t get me started on schemes to reduce the CO2 content of the atmosphere to ‘save’ us from global warming. Talk about unintended consequences.)
Leif: Thanks for the graph! Reminds me always that sometimes I can’t see the forest for the trees.
Anthony,
Last week {12 Jun} CO2Sceptic carried a post announcing a hurricane forecast issued by WeatherAction, based on Solar Weather technique, whatever that is, predicting a hurricane in the Caribbean/Gulf, 18-22 Jun:
http://co2sceptics.com/news.php?id=1434
The most recent posting from NOAA, discusses a tropical wave in the forecasted area (83w, 21n):
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/refresh/MIATWDAT+shtml/162346.shtml?
WeatherStreet has a nice image at:
http://www.weatherstreet.com/hurricane/2008/Hurricane-Atlantic-2008.htm
Have to admire the daring of this group in putting itself way out there so far in advance. If the wave does turn into a storm {or even a hurricane}, it’ll be named Bertha. The next few days should be interesting to see how this develops ~ or fizzles.
BTW – if you’re into tennis, they’re also calling for Wimbledon to be a rather soggy affair this year. Time will tell.
Leon
Gentelmen,
I know this sounds a bit base, but I’m having a hard time understanding this. From what I can gather, the general hypothesis is that the world will warm and cool in accordance solar magnetic activity. So, what does this mean, potentially, if the sun is really slowing down? Also, could we be off in models of star life and the sun is entering another phase, i.e. has run out of hydrogen, earlier than expected?
I apologize if the terminology isn’t correct. I am but a humble Engineering student and not a world class physicist.
Leif Svalgaard (13:04:45)
“I’m not saying that the region count is constant. I’m saying that even if it were constant, the sunspot number would be different.”
Fine.
Sorry you had to go to the trouble of a numerical example.
Lets leave it at that.
[…] Posted on 16 June 2008 by Andrew I stumbled upon an interesting blog article concerning trends of solar activity. I found it interesting — your mileage may vary — as I like to ponder deep thoughts of […]