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
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
And the NorthWest Passage is nearly open but you would have to take the treacherous route south of King William Island that Roald Amundsen took when he became the first the make it through (only a small yacht-sized boat can navigate these waters.)
The main straight-through passage has opened up more on the eastern side but the western side has been accumulating more ice lately due to icepack drifting from the east and north. So the straight-through passage will be at least 3 weeks yet (don’t know why any ship would want to wait for a two week opening in late August to use the Passage.)
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?2008215/crefl1_367.A2008215184000-2008215184459.4km.jpg
Flowers4Stalin:
I wouldn’t be so quick to discount your previous prediction. Watching for sunspots is like the old cold war sport of “Kremlin watching”….
I think a great service is given via Jan Jannsen’s ‘spotless days” evolution graph http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/Spotless/Spotless.html#Evolution
IOW, just b/c SC23 spots aren’t to be seen doesn’t mean the SC24 cycle is picking up. The # of cumulative spotless days says more about the general state of the dynamo.
Sunspot Groups (SSG) have slowed to a relative crawl. Based on this Hathaway predicts a *strong* SC24 based on his conveyor model, but a *weak* SC25 based on the same model that inheres a 1-cycle lag from observation to outcome. Their track record on predicting SC’s from SSG movement looks pretty good (heh – but we have climate models that claim the same ability). I also surmise there are some things they can’t model, like the fact that since circa 1992 the sun has already *dimmed* on avg by -0.1 degrC. It doesn’t have to go stone quiet for there to be an effect.
Were I to take both SSG rate of motion *and* cumulative spotless days evolution I’d say both reflect a regime change in the sun *and* the ongoing slackening of -0.1 degrC *AND* magnetic field being unusually low, I’d say we have a trend. Solanki (IIRC) cites it as a “boom-bust” system, and it boomed brilliantly in the mid- to late-20th C. Now we get indicators that it’s showing signs of hangover, which again reinforces the idea that there’ll be a longer-term slowdown.
I’d say “wait and see.” Missing SC23 sunspots may not actually mean that SC24 is ready to pick up. We need SC24 sunspots first. 🙂
Carlston,
Thanks for the link. It looks interesting.
anna v
I once programed a solar system simulator just using f = (G*m1*m2)/(r*r) between the planets and the sun and some iterative integration. I used the sun as the origin and it worked beautifully.
Then just for fun, I set the origin to earth. And there it was. The epicycles were there but more importantly for me, I saw that the sun does orbit the earth if one’s reference point is the earth. The orbit appeared to be a perfect circle outside all the planets in my simple simulation, if I remember correctly. One objection to the Bible instantly disappeared from my mind. Oh, BTW, pi does equal 3 to one significant digit.
Being male, it was also fun to send large objects into the solar system and watch planets being ejected from the solar system.
I had a lot of fun with that simulator. Too bad I lost it.
Rasmin: you are correct that I have little tolerance for ideas that are wrong. Most of the time people do not get these ideas by them selves but by finding stuff on the internet and by being taking in by the simplistic scenario. As a scientist I feel that I have an obligation to set things straight, as quiescence is often mistaken for acceptance. So, what I lack in tolerance [another way of putting it is, that I do not believe in relativism – that any idea is as good as any other idea] I may make up for with patience. I take the time to respond to people, such as you, for instance.
The situation you describe is akin to the standard tidal problem. One can actually calculate the displacements due to these alignments and they turn out to be real [as you correctly surmise], but small – of the order of 1 km and hence totally insignificant compared to planetary distances that are hundred of millions times larger. The main reason for the smallness of this effect is that differences between gravitational forces do not fall off with the square of the distance, but with the cube of the distance.
Arthur Glass: When Rudolf Wolf first put his sunspot series together he had cycles 5 and 6 to be 50% larger than in his later [and still surviving] sunspot series. So the Dalton minimum values were adjusted downwards by a factor of ~1.5. Adjustments are all over the place. In actual fact, we are still not sure of exactly how strong those cycles were.
Lief:
Lief:
“But, I’ll tell you that I have tried many, many times to explain that the Sun [and the Earth] do not feel any forces going around in their orbits [they are in ‘free fall’], but it has absolutely no effect. I cannot remember a single person responding with “oh, I see now that there are no barycentric effects, thank you”. Not a single one.”
That’s for a reason, Lief: Consider what happened when comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 tried to orbit its barycenter with Jupiter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_force
Arthur Glass (06:24:46) : Cycle 23 began in May of 1996. or 12 years and two months ago (146 months), which would, according to the archives on that site, make it longer than any cycle since the middle of the 19th c.
You are correct. Surprising that it’s not bigger news, eh?
Arthur Glass (06:24:46) :
These things are counted on the basis of a 13 month moving average, with the first and last months being given weights of .5, with the effect that it is a centered 12 month smoothing. We don’t know when the bottom comes until six months after the fact. For a 12 year cycle, it will have to end in a smoothed number that bottoms out in May 2008. But we have to wait until December to know what the May number was.
> As a scientist I feel that I have an obligation to set things
> straight, as quiescence is often mistaken for acceptance.
> So, what I lack in tolerance [another way of putting it is,
> that I do not believe in relativism – that any idea is as good
> as any other idea] I may make up for with patience.
The casual appeal of science is to throw some stuff against the wall & see what sticks, but to get past pseudoscience or flimsy speculation we need solid reality-testing while digging into some pretty far-fetched ideas.
I suppose you heard recently of the neutron-neutron attraction discovery, blieeve I read it applies to all nucleons. Who would’ve known? But it took rigorous testing to find it.
I can propose extra dimensions to explain entanglement & superpositioning, and suggest whatever extra-dimensional fields serve to scaffold the Higgs field are teleconnect shortcuts under the right circumstances, but I know darn well I’m just shootin sci-fi into the air….
> gravitational forces do not fall off with the square of the distance
> , but with the cube of the distance.
Must be those extraspatial trans-Higgs thingees sponging off gravitons….
So is there a credible challenge to the idea that solar neutrinos evaporate before they get to the Earth? How about the solar metal core theory? Is this way-out, or do the proponents have hope of gaining broader interest?
leebert:
Yes, we do need SC 24 spots to say the sun is getting ready for a new cycle shortly. However, there have been many SC 23 plage and magnetic regions that have been very weak and seem incapable of forming spots. On the other hand, there have been increasing amounts of SC 24 magnetic regions of light, and this plage region that is on the sun now is something worth mentioning, considering the AWOL SC 23. The smoothed number for the 11 years and 8 months checkpoint, 4.2, is pretty low. I do think it will dip lower, but I believe the chances of a Dalton Minimum are continuing to decrease, and the only way that will happen is if the smoothed number goes back up before going back down, a lot like what SC 11 did in its last few years: http://www.dxlc.com/solar/cycl11.html
As for my “hybrid” prediction, it is probably chickens*** for me to quit on that one now, and I think it is a done deal it will be weaker than SC 23 by a significant margin, but I am getting antsy with those SC 24 magnetic regions. Irrational? Maybe. But the sun is REALLY quiet now; low flux, low wind, low spots. Anyway, what is your prediction? Are you with the Maunder cult, the Dalton cult, the hybrid cult, the Svalgaard cult, the normal cult, the Hathaway cult, or the Dikpati cult? (or are some of them sects? ;-))
Bill Illis (06:37:39) says:
“NSIDC is known for not making their data public (graphs is all you get) and for adjusting the data without any explanation. ”
NSIDC uses data from the Numbus-7 SMMR satellite, the DMSP defence agency data set, and the SMM/I data set. They are all available online, 2 of them from links within the NSIDC web site. Registration is requested but not required – there are links to bypas registration when accessing the data.
Nimbus-7 SMMR and SMM/I brightness data are available here:
http://nsidc.org/data/nsidc-0071.html
DMSP data is available here:
http://cindispace.utdallas.edu/DMSP/
SMM/I data is available here:
http://nsidc.org/daac/projects/passivemicro/ssmi.html
This page discusses interpretation of the image data, and the links at the upper left give access to the processing steps used to convert the satellite data into images and area/extent values.
It is simply not true to say that they don’t give access to the data. It is poor practice to say such things without being sure one is correct.
pochas: You are conflating the ‘barycenter’ theory and tidal effects. The former have nothing to do with tides but with [mis-applied] torques and angular momentum. Tidal effects can be very strong [as the comet showed] when you get close enough. So, the ‘reason’ is simply that people have not thought this out.
leebert: So is there a credible challenge to the idea that solar neutrinos evaporate before they get to the Earth?
The neutrinos change ‘type’ and this is well-established. One can see this effect by observing neutrinos from nuclear power stations propagating through the Earth.
How about the solar metal core theory? Is this way-out, or do the proponents have hope of gaining broader interest?
This is quackery of highest carat [up there with the ‘electric universe’]. There is kind of a ‘discussion’ over at http://solarcycle24.forumco.com/topic~TOPIC_ID~353~whichpage~1.asp [and next next 4 or 5 pages]. This is almost fun to read, if it weren’t so sad, that in this day and age people are at each others throat over such drivel.
AskQuestions,
NSIDC can give any explanation of methodology that they want, but the imagery in their maps don’t jibe with the interpretation shown in their Arctic trend map over the last two days.
Being verbose is not an excuse for being wrong.
AskQuestions – can you give us a link to actual data.
I’ve clicked around those links a dozen times before and you never get to any data – just more links saying there is data here and data there.
Flowers:
> Anyway, what is your prediction? Are you with the Maunder cult,
> the Dalton cult, the hybrid cult, the Svalgaard cult, the normal
> cult, the Hathaway cult, or the Dikpati cult? (or are some of
> them sects? ;-))
They’re all safe sects, AFAIK. 🙂
Being far less knowledgeable in the topic than most people posting here, I look at how some experts find certain data striking. The unusual low magnetic field, the ongoing dimming since ’91.
I guess there are two notable predictions that follow along with the sun having already slowed down since the early 1990’s: Hathaway’s SC25 & SODA/Lief’s SC24.
Seeing how they agree & disagree, both, my gut instinct surmises there’s some kind of hybrid answer. The upper conveyance of sunspot groups has slowed a great deal (regardless of whether there’s a convective layer conveyor belt or not…), the magnetic output is low, SC23 is going long, the cumulative spotless days is in a steep ascent, etc. Whether SC24 turns out as a 90 or 70, the beast is slowing down, and the SSG (per Hathaway) movement suggests SC25 to be even lower.
When I look at Janssens’ spotless days evolution it looks more like a 19th C. SC transit. Janssens is great b/c he concedes its only trend stats, but he’s showing us something, no doubt.
So when experts agree by disagreeing in what seem rather telling ways I think: “Ahah! Something’s really up!”
That would make me… ecumenical.
leebert:
No, already Newton knew this. Trivial to deduce: try to differentiate the function 1/r^2 …
Leif or anyone else,
I’ll try one more time. I know pretty much what has happened with the Sun in the last couple of years, I’m just trying to see if anyone knows why.
My first question is why has the Sun’s conveyor belt slowed down?
What would make it speed up again?
I get 1/r^2 = r^-2. The differential would then be r^-3 = 1/r^3 or inversely proportional to the cube of the distance. Oh, I get it. F = (G*m1*m2)/ r^2. dF/dr = (G*m1*m2)/ r^3.
Leif,
You seem to be a hot stove that people can’t resist touching. Hang in there, please. You are an acquired taste.
drat! insuffficient spacing in my previous post. The result is:
dF/dr = (G*m1*m2)/ r^3.
Wow! It must be fun to have a brain. But maybe lonely too.
Actually, wouldn’t that be -2 *etc.
d/dx x^n = n x^n-1
Lief is being clever here 🙂 the rate of change of gravitational force is indeed proportional to r^3.
Hey, I have a question that’s always bugging me:
What is the gravitational potential of an object at the center of the Earth? Is it zero, just as if it were removed at an infinite distance (mathematically)? For a ray of light falling to the centre of the Earth from the surface, is it red-shifted or blue-shifted?
OK, two questions, and a little O/T, sorry.
Leif Svalgaard:
You need to edit the Wikipedia page on “Center of Mass”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_of_mass#Barycenter_in_astronomy
to clear up the misstatements there, such as,
“The Sun orbits a barycenter just above its surface” due to the mass of Jupiter.
The animations on the page are very misleading, as they clearly show objects “in freefall” orbiting around a common barycenter.
So if you can edit this Wikipedia page, you can probably help prevent some misunderstandings.
But I don’t suppose you can do anything about this guy and his “Gravity Simulator” program, which clearly shows the discredited “Barycenter” idea, with the sun moving all around systematically in that crazy “trefoil” pattern.
http://orbitsimulator.com/gravity/articles/ssbarycenter.html
Robert Wood,
Yes, my mistake. So how about:
dF/dr = (-2.*G*m1*m2)/ r^3?
John-X: I have no desire to rewrite the Wikipedia entry. It is OK as it is. What is wrong is how people interpret what they read. Let us go through some simplified exercises.
Imagine a solar system with a Sun and a Jupiter in a perfectly circular orbit [same masses and almost same distance as our real solar system such that the Jupiter revolution takes 12 years] and for the time being, no other bodies. This is actually a fair approximation to our real system because Jupiter’s mass is greater than all the other planets together.
In this system, the center of mass [CM] will be on the Sun-Jupiter line always at the same distance [1,000,000 km or so – I didn’t calculate it precisely, because it doesn’t matter much] from the center of the Sun, a bit outside of the Sun. Seen from the Sun, Jupiter will complete one full revolution every 12 years and the CM will also, because it is on the Sun-Jupiter line, always right in front of Jupiter. So, the CM orbits the Sun, as seen from the Sun.
Seen from Jupiter, the Sun completes one full revolution in 12 years, and the CM also, as it is on the Jupiter-Sun line, right in front of the Sun, just a tad closer to Jupiter than the solar surface. Neither the Sun nor Jupiter will feel any forces because the gravitational force is precisely balanced by the centrifugal force of the orbital movement [I here refrain from sophisticated General Relativity, and use only concepts that would have been familiar to Newton, and perhaps to most of you as well]. At all times, the distance between the Sun and Jupiter would be the same.
Seen from the CM [it is actually impossible to put a free observer there, not because the Sun is too hot, but because at the distance of only a million km from the center of the Sun, the orbital period would be very short rather than 12 years – but let that slide, this is a thought experiment after all, and as I have said in earlier posts, it is allowed to not follow the laws of Nature]
The Sun would be observed by that observer to revolve about the CM in precisely 12 years and Jupiter would too, located at the opposite point in the sky. Because an observer on the Sun already does not feel any forces [we are ignoring the already calculated minute tidal forces that raise the surface by a hard to measure one thousandth of a meter], us placing an imagined observer at the CM seeing the Sun compete a very tight orbit about the CM would not suddenly cause the observer on the Sun to feel anything.
I could now add another planet [or my little pea from a previous discussion] to displace the CM somewhat. That would still not affect the motion of Jupiter and the Sun [except from very, very small gravitational perturbations], nor, all the sudden cause the observer on the Sun to begin to feel any forces. The CM would now not move in the neat circles from before, but in a more complicated path because of the new planet. Seen from the Sun, the two planets would still move in their perfectly circular orbits with their distances being constant. But, as the CM now moves in a complicated path, the Sun [and the planets] will seen from the gyrating CM move in correspondingly complicated orbit[s]. But this is only because we have chosen to view the Sun from a wildly moving point, just like the trees on a downhill mountain side seem to weave left and right seen by a slalom skier completing her run.
This is about as clear as I can make it. If this does not work, I don’t know what else to say.