From SIDC (Solar Influences Data analysis Center): http://sidc.oma.be/products/quieta/
START OF ALL QUIET ALERT ………………….. The SIDC – RWC
Belgium expects quiet Space Weather conditions for the next 48 hours or until further notice. This implies that: * the solar X-ray output is expected to remain below C-class level, * the K_p index is expected to remain below 5, * the high-energy proton fluxes are expected to remain below the event threshold.
They should have also added…”Have a nice weekend!”
The monthly sunspot numbers are low, really low:
200801 2008.041 3.4 * 4.2 * 200802 2008.123 2.1 * 200803 2008.205 9.3 * 200804 2008.287 2.9 * 200805 2008.372 2.9 * 200806 2008.454 3.1 * 200807 2008.539 0.5 *
And the 10.7CM radio flux is holding below 67.
h/t to Barry Hearn
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Dennis Sharp:
Colorado has had a colder than normal start to the year: http://climvis.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/cag3/state-map-display.pl
I recall seeing many record low temperatures in your state so far this year, especially in the mountains. Take a look at the data: http://www.weather.gov/climate/index.php?wfo=bou
Denver’s hottest temperature ever is 105 degrees, set in 1878 (a year of solar minimum) and 2005.
The three year lag “rule” for solar activity only applies to the “global warming” cycles. It has been shown, such as in 1996 and 1902 for just a few examples, that a solar minimum brings more immediate effects, and behaves differently from the strong cycles. In the early 1900s, many states in the West, such as Arizona, recorded all-time record high temperatures and record warm months that still stand to this day. Don’t worry, when a record low temperature hits Denver again, you can convert your friends to our all-holy global cooling cult!
Leif Svalgard: Well I am trying to understand, that’s the amazing part. Most people are not. I realise your referenced TSI observations, I am trying to understand *why*. For how many years do we have 1 in 200,000 precision TSI measurements?
The Sun’s movements around the barycenter are quite complex, so for the Sun-Earth distances to stay the same as when corresponding to no other planets present, the observations seem to imply the perturbations to the Earths orbit must be matching the Sun’s orbit almost exactly.
I presume then the same goes for the other planets (assuming same precision TSI observations from those other planets), and our solar system N-body problem is then reduced to N-1 2-body problems then…? hmm.
This might be a limit of my imagination, but I appreciate the argument that the observed TSI variation is too small. Thanks for your reply.
Leif,
Thanks for the reply. Here is my shot at what i think you are saying:
The sun is moving in space that is constantly being warped by the orbiting planets. As far as the sun is concerned (neglecting tidal effects) it is just moving smoothly through space but because that space is warped it appears to wobble to a distant observer. It is not the sun that is being jerked around by the planets but the space the sun moves in?
Leif Svalgaard:
‘It is not the Sun that moves, but the center of gravity that moves as the planets move around.’
As an interested non-scientist, I may well be missing something here, but it sounds as if you are saying the sun’s position is unaffected by the gravitational fields of the planets. The image I am getting is of all the bodies in the Solar System moving around, thus shifting their common center of gravity, but without perturbing one another. Surely that can’t be right unless Mr Newton was seriously mistaken? My naive understanding is that gravity acts between bodies with mass, rather than between a body and a ‘center of gravity’ which may not contain any mass. Apologies if I have completely misunderstood you.
Leif, I do believe that the barycentric effects do not affect earth temperature. Thanks for the many explanations. I’ve never seen the sun wobble.
Carsten: the 1:200,000 is for the SORCE instrument. For earlier, the precision was less, but still way beyond needed [1:1000] to show that the distance behaves as it should [no jerking].
statePoet: you are basically correct.
We had a discussion of this problem a while ago on this blog. I had a thought experiment with moving a pea around in the solar system and showed that I could put the barycenter where I wanted to by simply placing the pea sufficiently far away.
John and others: Let me try a different tack: It is often said that Jupiter pulls the Sun towards it and that that displaces the Sun at times by up to more than a solar radius, but Jupiter also pulls the Earth in almost the same direction as the Earth is so close to the Sun [27 times closer than Jupiter – in gravitational terms – square of distance] so maybe it is not so surprising that the distance between the Sun and the Earth does not change by the distance between the Sun and the barycenter, but is almost unaffected by the position of the barycenter. This is an invalid argument, but somehow seems to have appeal to people believing in the equally invalid barycenter effect.
I really should not have used that invalid argument, but sometimes I get really frustrated by the resilience of the barycenter crowd. Nothing sticks and even an observational demonstration that the idea does notwork has no effect.
Leif,
You said that Statepoet was basically correct.
Why should it matter that the Solar System is moving through space?
The Sun and planets, all mass in the System, resides within the gravity well of the Sun. Doesn’t the gravity of each body affect the others? Say if Jupiter is one one side of the System and Earth on the other, that Jupiter would pull the Sun some distance from Earth reference?
Let me try another thought experiment: imagine a double star. Two identical stars at a fair distance from each other. Let each star have its own planetary system [assume circular orbits], where the planets surely revolve around ‘their’ star. We can place to two stars far enough from each other that this is true. Now, the center of mass will be very close to the point halfway between the stars. The two stars will seen from afar seem to ‘wiggle’ around each other as the whole system [traced out by the center of mass] moves through the universe and the planets will also trace out even more complicated wiggles, but that does not mean that inhabitants of one of the planets would see everything [their sun and its planets] wiggle along above their heads. No, the distance to their sun would stay constant and the other planets would be observed to have nice circular orbits, no wiggling. We can always move the other star far enough away so that the above holds true to any degree of accuracy. The barycenter will still be halfway between the two stars, way outside the surface of the stars, even way outside the individual star systems. No brutal jerking around of stars and planets. And, BTW, no sunspots generated, and no climate effects either.
Glenn: That would be the same problem as tides on the Earth caused by the Moon: wouldn’t the gravity of the Moon pull more on the ocean facing the Moon than on the center of the Earth? Yes it will. One can calculate the height of the tidal bulge to be 0.38 meter. The same calculation on the analogous situation with Jupiter taking the place of the Moon and the Sun taking the place of the moon-facing ocean. The result is 625 meter.
The Denver NWS weather article was hilarious The link below shows the official temperature set generated for Fort Collins by the State Climatologist.
http://ccc.atmos.colostate.edu/~autowx/fclwx_plotsearch.php?graph=1&span=20&station=FCLWX&year=2008&month=07&day=31&dimensions=2
It has been a picture perfect summer along the Front Range – with cool to cold nights and warm afternoons. Fort Collins is geographically very similar to Denver, but is a much smaller Urban heat island.
The “normal” high in Denver this time of year is 88 degrees, so having a couple of weeks of 90 degree weather is hardly newsworthy. We normally break 100 once or twice every summer.
P.S. I’m in London this weekend, and everyone is complaining about the second straight year without a summer in the UK. No doubt The Met Office will find some statistic to make it appear unusually warm.
Anthony, I’m quite amazed at the fact that just about every discussion of the Sun eventually ends up with the same silly barycenter arguments. That idea seems to have enormous ‘legs’ and just won’t lie down. Over at CA, we have finally instituted a policy of not getting into barycentric/tidal solar activity theories and associated climate repercussions, so perhaps I should shut up now. If only the rest of you would too…
NSIDC just whacked half a million km2 of ice off the Arctic Ice extent during the last few hours. Must be having a really hot day (politically) up there.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
Leif, thanks for your explanation. The best way for me to understand it is that both the Sun and the Earth [and the other planets] are in free fall. That explains the situation clearly [to me, anyway], and why the frame of reference of each one appears to be stationary. Your binary star explanation helped, too.
Problem is, I can’t remember why we were having this conversation.
Patrick Henry,
It looks like the last few days have been warm in the Arctic. The ground stations have been reporting warmer temps and clearer skies, the bouys are showing warmer water, the Igloo webcam shows above freezing and clear skies…but the NSIDC looks more like a one million Km drop to me. Of course, that is more than half the size of Alaska (1.7 Mil). And I sure don’t eyeball that big a loss here:
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=07&fd=29&fy=2008&sm=08&sd=01&sy=2008
I predict an eventual partial Northwest Passage, low of a little over 5 M km2 and an early winter recovery. Now if I could just get 2 cents for that.
Leif,
Would it be fair to summarize your position to say that the sun is in free fall in an odd looking constantly changing orbit without experiencing the effects of it’s acceleration (ignoring tides)? BTW, does anyone have diagram of how the sun wobbles?
Stellar wobble is detected by Doppler redshift. Astronomers
find planets by observing the effect that their orbits have on their sun.
Seems the same would apply to an alien observing our system.
This appears to be evidence that the Sun would “wobble” depending on
the orbits and configuration of the planets. Perhaps this is not relative to what is under discussion with respect to the “barycenter” thing.
Patrick Henry
I’m guessing that the north atlantic current is transferring so much heat from lower latitudes that once the winds carry it over western Europe, it’s raining almost all the time. Of course, the winds are fickle. I hear that Greece is in drought.
Actually, it was 104 in Denver yesterday and 103 today. Both temperatures broke all time time records going back to the turn of the century. This when the longest day of the year was over a month ago and the earth is at aphelion with the sun. Impressive global warming for the front range of Colorado. The forcast is for high 80’s next week, so I’m not too worried.
On a global scale, I would surmise we should watch to see if arctic ice increases in the next 5 years. There may also be some news stories about Canadian wheat farmers not getting the growing season they need. Or, maybe, just maybe it only gets to 95 next summer in my home town of Fort Collins.
Leif,
I buy your argument on the barycenter not affecting sunspots, so what is your explanation for the sun’s conveyor belt slowing to a crawl?
Leif
Thanks for the clarification on the 0.02% “. . .that assuming [as I do because of its good calibration] that SORCE is correct, that it is PMOD that has been drifting and that there very likely is no decrease since last minimum. . .”
Look forward to seeing that confirmed by the future Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory.
Glenn,
Thanks for the reply. I don’t think the question is whether the sun wobbles; it is, I think, whether the sun is “aware” it is wobbling. In another words, an accelerometer at the center of the sun would not detect any acceleration no matter how violent the sun’s orbit might be. If I am wrong, someone please correct me.
I’m reading all this and remembering my physicist Dad trying to explain barycenters to me when I was in school. This is a different take so I’ll try it. The first analogy I had in mind back then was a ball on a string swinging around my head. But you can feel the force of that, and that force is not what gravity is like. Next analogy was two magnets pulling on one another, and you can feel that, too. But that’s also a different force than gravity.
What clarified it for me was the classic analogy of a bowling ball on a rubber sheet, making a huge wide dent into which you roll a marble. The marble makes a little dent also, which maybe has a very tiny effect on the bowling ball’s space, but they don’t “feel” each other, even though the marble is circling the bowling ball. They don’t even “feel” their space-time dents in the rubber sheet, even if those dents influence their paths through space. There is no tugging or pulling going on at all, its an entirely different ‘force’ at work.
If I’ve had this analogy wrong all these years, I’m willing to be corrected. But I’ve never had an issue with Leif’s take on barycenters when thinking of orbital relationships in this way.
Dr. Svalgaard would really appreciate it if all mentions, explanations, theories, or opinions about barycenters ceased once and for all.
Okay, so we’re at the solar minimum between SC 23 & 24.
Now, here are a few questions.
1. How long will it be until SC 23 is 13 years long?
2. How many days since a SC 24 spot will it be for people to really take notice?
3. Is it out of the question that a prolonged SC 23 will lead to a continued flat or decreasing global temperature?