Its all quiet on the solar front. Too quiet. It has now been almost 2 and a half months since the last counted cycle 24 sunspot has been seen on April 13th, 2008. There was a tiny cycle 24 “sunspeck” that appeared briefly on May 13th, but according to solar physicist Leif Svalgaard, that one never was assigned a number and did not “count”. It is just barely discernable on this large image from that day.
The sun today: spotless
NASA’s David Hathaway updated his solar cycle prediction page on June 4th. The start of cycle 24 keeps getting pushed forward while the ramp up line starts to look steeper into 2009.
Click for full sized image
The most recent forecast ( June 27th, 2008 ) from the Space Weather Prediction Center says little that would suggest our spotless streak would end any time soon:
Solar Activity Forecast: Solar activity is expected to be very
low.
Analysis of Solar Active Regions and Activity from 26/2100Z
to 27/2100Z: Solar activity was very low. No flares occurred during
the past 24 hours and the solar disk remains spotless.
So when will solar cycle 24 really get going? It seems even the best minds of science don’t know for certain. A NOAA press release issued last year in April 2007 calls for Cycle 24 to be up to a year late, but they can’t decide on the intensity of SC24. That argument is ongoing.
Meanwhile the NOAA SEC Solar Cycle Progression Page looks pretty flat in all metrics charted.
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I’ve been looking at daily solar images since 1998, watching sunspots come and go. I click on the solar link at the right at least once a day, waiting for a sunspot to appear. So far, the Sun is spookily quiet.
I predict that July is the month the 24 cycle sunspots begin to come on.
Pardon this skeptic’s doubt, but what are these forecasts based on? Science or statistics? If they’re basing the future on what happened in the past, then the science is really shallow — they’ve got a really long road ahead.
Total Solar Irradiance from the Sorce instrument continues to decline as well signaling that Cycle 23 is not over yet.
Some interesting mini-cycles in this plot of TSI over the past year with a six-hour time interval between measurements.
http://lasp.colorado.edu/cgi-bin/ion-p?ION__E1=PLOT%3Aplot_tsi_data.ion&ION__E2=PRINT%3Aprint_tsi_data.ion&ION__E3=BOTH%3Aplot_and_print_tsi_data.ion&START_DATE=1609&STOP_DATE=2050&TIME_SPAN=6&PLOT=Plot+Data
Given NOAA’s prvious success recently I can expect to see solar max any day now.
Isn’t the general theory that the longer the wait, the less the solar activity? If so – are we heading into a decade-long cold snap?
As can be seen from my website, a cycle 24 spot was seen also on May 04, I imaged it with an 8 inch amateur telescope and webcam. The spot was so small that image stacking and sharpening was needed to see it properly in the final image. The spot disappeared rather quickly, so it is no surprise it didn’t count as an official spot. If such tiny spots appeared during the Maunder minimum in the 17th century, they would not have been seen or counted, given the available observation technologies then.
The updated cycle 24 prediction graph from Hathaway you are showing seems to agree only with the highest of the two NOAA prediction curves from April 2007 (why hasn’t there been an update??). The highest prediction expects cycle 24 to be more active than cycle 23. My hunch is that this is now increasingly unlikely, since cycle 23 is now well over 11 years old, maybe even more than 12 years depending on selected start date for cycle 23. Long cycles appear to be correlated with lower activity in the following cycle. To reach the predicted high activity level in time of the predicted maximum date, a rather steep growth curve is needed now.
Hathaway states in http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/predict.shtml that “We then use the shape of the sunspot cycle as described by Hathaway, Wilson, and Reichmann [Solar Physics 151, 177 (1994)] and determine a starting time for the cycle by fitting the data to produce a prediction of the monthly sunspot numbers through the next cycle.”
So what if the upcoming cycle has a different shape than the previous one? It is well established that the 23 cycles we have seen so far do not all have the same shape (not at all). And Hathaway’s own cycle 24 curve shape does not really have the same shape as the curve for cycle 23 in the same graph.
I can’t help thinking that this low sunspot activity looks much more like an upcoming grand minimum than a high activity cycle.
Dr. Lief Svalgaard points out that Hathaway’s convection model missed this long, slow transit between SC23 & 24 and doesn’t predict a lower SC 24. Svalgaard’s magnetic dynamo model predicts a slow transit & half-scale SC 24.
But Hathaway’s & Svalgaard’s models both predict a half-scale SC 25 in 2020. That would entail an average loss of sunspot faculae, resulting in loss of warming UV to the tune of -0.2 degrees Celsius from hereon. If cloud-nucleating cosmic rays or loss of auroral particles have an impact, then an even larger decrease.
But the sun has already, inexplicable, dimmed its average output by -0.1 degrC since the early 1990’s.
So we could be looking at a net dimming of -0.3 degrC overall, and if the sun’s luminance falls back to 19th C levels (offsetting all the 20th century gain prior to the 1960’s) then that could entail a net -0.5 degrC or more.
Now think about all the scary talk from the warmists. Do they even mention the remotest possibility that solar dimming would offset their oft-cited +1.0 to +2.0 degrC?
The Aqua satellites, IIRC, are showing more cloud cover. Could cosmic rays help make the middle troposphere drier and cooler whilst the surface is cloudier?
As can be seen from my website, a cycle 24 spot was seen also on May 04, I imaged it with an 8 inch amateur telescope and webcam. The spot was so small that image stacking and sharpening was needed to see it properly in the final image. The spot disappeared rather quickly, so it is no surprise it didn’t count as an official spot. If such tiny spots appeared during the Maunder minimum in the 17th century, they would not have been seen or counted, given the available observation technologies then.
The updated cycle 24 prediction graph from Hathaway you are showing seems to agree only with the highest of the two NOAA prediction curves from April 2007 (why hasn’t there been an update??). The highest prediction expects cycle 24 to be more active than cycle 23. My hunch is that this is now increasingly unlikely, since cycle 23 is now well over 11 years old, maybe even more than 12 years depending on selected start date for cycle 23. Long cycles appear to be correlated with lower activity in the following cycle. To reach the predicted high activity level in time of the predicted maximum date, a rather steep growth curve is needed now.
Hathaway states in http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/predict.shtml that “We then use the shape of the sunspot cycle as described by Hathaway, Wilson, and Reichmann [Solar Physics 151, 177 (1994)] and determine a starting time for the cycle by fitting the data to produce a prediction of the monthly sunspot numbers through the next cycle.”
So what if the upcoming cycle has a different shape than the previous one? It is well established that the 23 cycles we have seen so far do not all have the same shape. And Hathaway’s own cycle 24 curve shape does not really have the same shape as the curve for cycle 23 in the prediction graph.
I can’t help thinking that this low sunspot activity looks much more like an upcoming grand minimum than a high activity cycle.
I watch cosmic ray flux. It tends to peak at the bottom of the solar cycle, and starts going down as the next solar cycle gets under way. So look at this, from the Moscow Neutron Monitor:
http://cr0.izmiran.rssi.ru/scripts/nm64queryD.dll/mosc?PD=1&title=Moscow&dt=0&base=9600&Res=1_month&y1=2007&y2=2008&m1=1&m2=6&d1=1&d2=30&h1=0&h2=23&mn1=0&mn2=59
Assuming crf peaked last September, the slow start to solar cycle 24 is mirrored here by the failure of this chart to begin a more steady downward trend since then. In fact, it has been generally flat since last October, and is even a little higher of late than last October.
Bill: The mini cycles are just due to solar rotation. Image you have a bright spot on the Sun. After half rotation the bright spot would be on the backside, then after another, it would be back, and so on.
Leon: The forecasts are not based on statistics but on sound physics. The reason they differ is that we don’t have all of the parameters [and ‘initial conditions’] pinned down yet. After cycle 24 we should be able to do a better forecast of cycle 25. On physical grounds [the spot magnetic flux is ‘boyant’ and takes only a few months to rise to the surface], so if they were there [they take years to form] they should have been here already, but, as I said cycle 24 will be a crucial test of our ‘understanding’ of all this. We may be completely wrong, but we may also be correct, so this is a exciting time.
JLawson: the ‘cold snap’ idea is even more uncertain than the cycle forecast, even if the cycle turns out to be tiny. You just cannot a priory equate cold with few spots, there is very little evidence for that and even less physics. See Leon’s comment, if you wish to conclude from the past [e.g. LIA] that few spots equal cold.
Hey guys… Hathaways’s prediction graph. The Cycle 24 ramp-up looks like a hockey stick!
It’s true, it’s all true! Oh, the humanity!
… and I’m done with the silliness.
JLawson asked
“Isn’t the general theory that the longer the wait, the less the solar activity? If so – are we heading into a decade-long cold snap?”
According to Svalgaard, there is no correlation between solar activity and temperature. Many of us are not so sure about that.
Ieebert: I do not predict a low cycle 25 as my model only posits a short solar memory. Available statistics might support a low 25 and 26 as several low cycles tend to occur together [as do several high cycles], but that is just extrapolating from the past and is not a real prediction. Cycles 20 and 21are good examples of how wrong you can go if just extrapolating. Since 20 was low, one statistically might think 21should have been low too, yet 21 was arguably the second largest ever.
Well, I see that Leif responded to JLawson while I was preparing my response.
I will add that there’s no reason, at this point, to assume that cycle 24 will not eventually take off, and be just what about what Leif is predicting. As for climate, I see some evidence of bidecadal and decadal temperature variations I think have some connection to variations in solar activity. I think we’ll see some moderate warming as this solar cycle takes off, but nothing like we saw during the 1980’s and 1990’s, and that the next peak of the warming cycle will be lower than the last peak.
Has anyone compared the past predictions of Hathaways’s prediction graph?
Wondering if the peak has ever moved back, or if the rise is just getting steeper.
They seem to be tied into the peak date and amplitude, no matter how steep the ramp appears…
Can we see if the ramp EVER had that steep of a rise?
REPLY: Yes done it here already, see the movie
Basil: You misquote me [as everybody else does]. I never said that there is no correlation [there are thousands of papers claiming correlations], just that it has not been demonstrated that there is a physical connection/mechanism to the point that we take this as an established fact and go from there. A good analogy is the connection between solar activity and geomagnetic/auroral activity. This was also argued for more than a century until it was finally established about a hundred years ago. Today, you’ll not find any more papers discussing the reality of that connection. Such is the difference between demonstrated fact and speculation [the latter not bad in itself, being necessary for progress in the end].
REPLY: I just quoted you in this post, was that inaccurate? – Anthony
henry and others: A few things to be clear about: Hathaway’s prediction is his own private one, not official NASA or US gov. He can do as he pleases and for now he is sticking with his prediction [some consider that a virtue – not to ‘flip-flop’ 🙂 ], so he has to have an ever steepening curve [until it falls over …]. Second, the official prediction is NOAA’s. They have a bureaucratic problem, namely that they deliver a ‘product’ and are not allowed to change predictions once made.
Anthoni: your quote of my saying that the spot was too small and short-lived to be counted was correct [expect for misspelling my name 🙂 ]. There are, in fact several other criteria for counting a ‘tiny tim ‘, like been seen by at least two observers, and more.
REPLY: Well you misspelled mine above, so I guess we are even 😉
Sunspot counting may benefit from automated processing of MDI and magnetogram images. I can visuallize a way to take the images and come up with a spot count. Has it been tried?
Notice that GISS climate models use repetitions of the last cycle extending into the future. Reality isn’t cooperating.
Anthony: yes, I got even [on purpose…]. Automatic counting has been and is being tried. But, the manual counting works just fine and does benefit from 150 years of experience with this, while the automatic counting is too dependent of [uncertain and changing – aging!] calibration of spacecraft instruments that, after all, are exposed to a very harsh environment. The same problem has plagued TSI measurements from the beginning. The way SORCE does it [comparing with unvarying stars] finally solved that problem.
As an example on the failure of automatic counting see this one:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~obs/images/mpsi_all.png
Can someone see what is wrong with this plot?
I propose the Hocky Puck realist alternative to the Hocky Stickers.
It is the real thing;
… it may be whacked around by the Hocky Stick people but doesn’t care;
… and at the end of the game, nothing else scored.
“You just cannot a priory equate cold with few spots, there is very little evidence for that and even less physics. See Leon’s comment, if you wish to conclude from the past [e.g. LIA] that few spots equal cold.”
First I want to say that I respect Leif, and I have learned a lot from him on the Solar Cycle 24 web site. Agree or disagree, he seems to be doing his science as honestly as possible, and without an agenda.
That being said, I also have this gut feeling that he underestimates the effect of the sun on the climate. I know that is horribly unscientific, but it just seems to me that the correlation between solar cycles and temperature is too consistent to be attributed to a weak response to solar variation.
why I love reading Dr. S.
“We may be completely wrong, but we may also be correct, so this is a exciting time.”
None of this “i’m 99 certain” throw the bastards in jail crap.
Just sayin. he is always a pleasure to read and gives 10X what he takes.