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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Which Solar Cycle around 1900 was long and where do you reference the Arctic Seas becoming Ice Free in that period?
Is the Earth’s Magnetic Field subject to weakening due to Solar effects?
This is all getting rather tricky I see.
I can see where an exceptional Coronal Hole during High Solar Activity could melt some ice given a favorable alignment, but that would imply melting due to Maxima rather than Minima, unless the Minima is where Coronal Holes have their greatest effects.
I see we are going to have to wait for this summer to unfold to get some answers.
If Coronal Holes do thier greatest heating during minima, and the Solar Output of normal is diminished, this is a smoking gun for the Solar output spectrum to be shifting rather than diminshing.
According to this, there’s a lot of speculative reading going on of the trends, more like stock market forecasting.
R. J. Thompson1
(1) IPS Radio and Space Services, P.O. Box 702, 2010 Darlinghurst, NSW, Australia
Received: 28 April 1988
Abstract The new solar cycle, denoted Cycle 22, has risen faster than of any of the previous 21 cycles, indicating that the cycle is likely to be of large amplitude. Moreover, the rapid rise suggests that the cycle could be arriving early, perhaps similar to the phase advance which occurred during Cycles 1–4. The rapid early rise of Cycle 22 also suggests that there might be a connection with the period of extraordinarily low geomagnetic activity centred on 1980. If this is the case, then the suppression of geomagnetic activity is the first sign of a new cycle, in this case approximately 7 years prior to the official start of the cycle. This idea is consistent with recent ideas on the solar cycle and has significant implications for geomagnetic disturbance forecasting.
I’m completely under-educated on the topic of the sun, but I find it and this blog fascinating. Quick question for the more informed – How common is an equatorial coronal hole during a solar minimum? From most of what I’ve read, coronal holes are at the poles most of the time during solar minimums. What do you make of the current coronal hole at the equator? Could this mean the sun is starting to ramp up? Thanks in advance for your info.
jonk: the current equatorial coronal hole was created [or re-enforced] a few weeks ago by cycle 23 spots and is not a harbinger of cycle 24.
What does a coronal hole at the Sun’s equator signify for life on Earth?
Does the coronal hole travel about just like a Sunspot?
Thanks.
Robert: A coronal hole is simply a part of the solar atmosphere where the magnetic field is to weak to keep the atmosphere bottled up near the Sun. The Sun’s corona [upper atmosphere] is so hot [million degrees] that it escapes the Sun’s gravity except when held back by strong magnetic fields. As a result the solar wind comes largely from coronal holes. In itself the coronal hole [and the solar wind] do not have any significant effect on the Earth or its life, but the tangled magnetic field dragged along by the wind can connect with the Earth’s magnetic field and cause aurorae, magnetic storms, electric currents [which can blow up transformers and cause power outages]. Some of these effects can be sensed by animals [e.g. racing pigeons – the fanciers are avid watchers of solar activity and don’t fly their birds if the sun is acting up]. The tangled magnetic fields also reduce the cosmic ray flux by a few per cent, which may have some weak effects.
Coronal holes are features of the Sun and rotate with the sun as sunspots do.
Lief: I looked up the Australian Observatory sun data.
We have this Coronal Hole at the Sun’s equator, but the winds are mid velocity.
390km/s currently. Been averaging 330 km/s.
I guess from some of the charts & maps that 700+ km/s is what is supposed to come out of the polar holes at solar maximum.
So the mid-range winds are normal for the equator, just the hole is unexpected?
The thing is like a strobe or a rotating beacon.
Any ideas what will happen on 21’st December 2012 ?
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my post Dr. Svalgaard. Since the current coronal hole was caused by cycle 23 sunspots and coronal holes typically don’t happen during a solar minimum, would it be wrong to infer that we a still quite a way from the actual solar minimim and cycle 24 is 4-5 years from starting up in earnest?
That’s an interesting thought, jonk. Could be what happened during the Maunder Minimum. A cycle could simply fail to switch polarity, in which case you never get one. Then the Sun is stuck in the current cycle until it manages to get unstuck. Matches our current weather patterns: Stuck in Lodi.
Figure out why the Sun is stuck and you get the Nobel Prize.
Robert: The solar wind striking us comes from the Center of the disk [roughly] but it takes 5 days to get here: 150,000,000 km/ 333 km/s = 5 days, so the wind we see at Earth right now left the Sun five days ago. This corresponds to a point more than halfway out towards the edge of the Sun, where if you look right now there is no coronal hole.
jonk: coronal holes are quite common in the years leading up to the minimum so nothing unusual there.
Robert: we think that the Sun did change polarities during the Maunder Minimum [cosmic ray generated radioactive nuclei in ice cores tell us that]. A possibility to consider is that the spots were there but were invisible as has been recently been discussed in this blog.
so… Watt do you think about
“What’s Wrong with the Sun? (Nothing) 07.11.2008” on the NASA website?
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/11jul_solarcycleupdate.htm
Is there anything unusual about this coronal hole?
Longevity, size, position w/respect to place in cycle.
i.e. – what relationship if any can be related to the remarkable phenomena now observable on the ground (like a full year of windstorms, highs & lows w/extended latitude reach, melting Northwest Passage, shortened and altered growing season, widespread strange luminescent green on new growth, half moon w/darkside unusually lit to the point of full recognition of all major features like the rays of Tycho, craters, mtns. , Mare, scarps, etc).
I have observed the Moon for over 40 years in telescopes. I have never, ever seen recongnzable Earthshine past 3 days until now. I also never was able to make out all the features of the unlit portion until now. I have been ascribing it to light pollution striking, but now I’m not so sure.
With this recent spate of geomagnetic activity due to a high solar wind, is this some proof that sunspots are not directly associated with these types of events, or are they normally associated but not bound to them?
I.e. – The sun may appear to go benign during protracted minima but it is simply changing it’s ouput venue.
So many surprises.
Any partiucular reason you rejected this posting submitted 7.11.08?
“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.”
John Goetz Reply: It is likely it was sent automatically to the spam bucket.
Poor ol Sol, she’s flatlined don’tcha know.
Kind of like listening to a train receding into the distance. Just gets harder and harder to make out the sound of it from the background noise.
Pretty soon you find yourself listening for mirages.
Svalgaard (22:03:00) : Very informative coronal hole post, thanks.
Dr Svalgaard,
I recently read your 2005 paper
“Sunspot cycle 24: Smallest cycle in 100 years?”
How has recent WMO data affected your prediction for Rmax for cycle 24?
Is it just me, or is he cherry picking the data on this graph:
http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/Sun-039-s-Dead-Face-Nothing-out-of-the-Ordinary-Researchers-say-3.gif
Because there is no mention of what the gray lines mean, which are consistently much lower in cycle 23/24.
And one could easily say that in 1933 there were only 12 times that the sunspot number was 0 more than 15 days in a month and when by June 2008 it had already reached 10. This July will no doubt make it 11.
http://wso.stanford.edu/gifs/Polar.gif
The Solar Polar field suffered a voltage spike circa late Dec. 2005, and has been through 4 monotonous reversals evers since then.
blip bleep, blip bleep, blip bleep, blip bleep
And the sunspots plus all other activity signs just petered out, and the Sun stares back at us in all it’s uncanny sameness, day after day, month after month. The flywheel exhausted all of it’s momentum in less than 2 years.
All stop, coronal hole opens at equator and stays put.
Look for another voltage spike to jump start it.
Clear !
July’s sunspot average in today. 0.5 That’s quiet enough to hear a pin drop.
I don’t think it’s even snoring at this point.