The sun on 08/12/2008 just before midnight UTC – spotless
As many of you know, the sun has been very quiet, especially in the last month. In a NASA news release article titled What’s Wrong with the Sun? (Nothing) solar physicist David Hathaway goes on record as saying:
“It does seem like it’s taking a long time,” allows Hathaway, “but I think we’re just forgetting how long a solar minimum can last.”
No argument there. But it does seem to me that the purpose of Hathaway’s July 11th article was to smooth over the missed solar forecasts he’s made. Here is a comparison of early and more recent forecasts from Hathway:
Click for a larger image
He also seems intent on making sure that when compared to a grand minima, such as the Maunder Minimum, this current spotless spell is a mere blip.
The quiet of 2008 is not the second coming of the Maunder Minimum, believes Hathaway. “We have already observed a few sunspots from the next solar cycle,” he says. (See Solar Cycle 24 Begins.) “This suggests the solar cycle is progressing normally.”
What’s next? Hathaway anticipates more spotless days1, maybe even hundreds, followed by a return to Solar Max conditions in the years around 2012.
I would hope that Hathaway’s newest prediction, that this is “not the
second coming of the Maunder Minimum” or even a Dalton Minimum for that matter, holds true.
1Another way to examine the length and depth of a solar minimum is by counting spotless days. A “spotless day” is a day with no sunspots. Spotless days never happen during Solar Max but they are the “meat and potatoes” of solar minima.
Adding up every daily blank sun for the past three years, we find that the current solar minimum has had 362 spotless days (as of June 30, 2008).Compare that value to the total spotless days of the previous ten solar minima: 309, 273, 272, 227, 446, 269, 568, 534, ~1019 and ~931. The current count of 362 spotless days is not even close to the longest.
Though, Livingston and Penn seem to think we are entering into a grand minima via their recent paper.
As mentioned in “What’s next?”, we are now adding to the total of spotless days in this minima, and since the last update in that article, June 30th, 2008 where they mention this, we have added very few days with sunspots, perhaps 3 or 4.
Adding up every daily blank sun for the past three years, we find that the current solar minimum has had 362 spotless days (as of June 30, 2008).
So it would seem, that as of August 12th, 2008, we would likely have reached a total of 400 spotless days. The next milestone for recent solar minimas is 446 spotless days, not far off. It will be interesting to see where this current minima ends up.
h/t to Werner Weber
LEIF
What are your thoughts about solar wind induced currents in our stratosphere producing heat by joule heating.
L.N.Makarova in his paper called PARAMETERIZATION OF THE HEATING IN THE MIDDLE STRATOSPHERE DUE TO SOLAR WIND INDUCED ELECTRIC CURRENTS concluded as follows
Numerical estimations presented in this study show that the energy of the solar wind could be transferred into the Earth atmosphere through the electric fields induced by the solar wind disturbances. This process could be effective up to stratospheric altitudes 20-25 km where the ionized layer produced by the galactic cosmic rays and by some other sources exists. The electric currents induced by the electric fields are able to heat the atmosphere at altitude ~25 km up to 5.10-2 K/hour (1-2 K/day). It means that the stratospheric warming could be produced not only by dynamical factors but also by a local heating of the atmosphere by electric current.
http://www.pmodwrc.ch/eugene1560/sowa/data.phtml
LEIF
In L.N. Makarova’s second paper called A NEW APPROACH TO THE GLOBAL ELECTRIC CIRCUIT CONCEPTION , he states
The increasing of temperature of middle atmosphere is a result of atmosphere
heating by elecrtric current. Our preliminary numerical estimations show that under
typical atmospheric conditions the Joule heating of the stratosphere by the current is
comparable with rate of heating by the Sun ultra violet radiation in the ozone layer.
He also says in his paper that described their field tests in the Antarctica
In all presented
cases the stratospheric temperatures (altitudes 20-28 km) increases with approaching
of magnetopause more closely to the Earth.
We attract your attention to strong coupling between the magnetopause position
and the magnitudes of atmospheric electric field measured by the atmospheric
balloons above South Pole Station in Antarctica.
http://www.sgo.fi/SPECIAL/Contributions/Makarova.pdf
I am currently attempting to verify these findings with my own research .
“as a personal speculation that you can disagree with – if it falls with your specialty 🙂 ”
I don’t have any problem with people giving opinions outside of their specialties, I strongly object to the assignment of credibility to one side and denial to the other in accounts of those opinions.
I think that making statements, such as Hathaway does, that are based on models, as if they were simple facts is misleading and just creates skepticism. Nice thing is that there is an experiment going on right now. The answer will be known within a decade, I think. And before we go off half cocked on a “great leap forward” on energy, perhaps we ought to actually get our facts straight, not pretend that we have them straight.
Leif
Re: “variations of TSI on various time scales that ‘5-minute oscillations vary 0.003%, 27-day rotation gives a variation of 0.2%, the 11-year solar cycle yields 0.1%,” . . .”The Scafetta result is not generally accepted and is based on using the occurrence of solar flares as a proxy for TSI”
Scafetta and West mention four separate solar-temperature correlations summarized in Is climate sensitive to solar variability?.
Matching TSI Variability
“We maintain that the variations in Earth’s temperature are not noise, but contain substantial information about the source of variability, in particular the variations in TSI. Establishing this direct connection between the complex dynamics of the Sun and Earth requires a new kind of linking—one associated with the transfer of information between complex networks, even when the linking is extremely weak, as it is in the Sun–Earth network.”
“. . .both the fluctuations in TSI, using the solar flare time series as a surrogate, and Earth’s average temperature time series are observed
to have inverse power-law statistical distributions.”
Complexity Matching
“the Sun’s influence on Earth’s temperature is subtle because it is not
just an energy transport process but also an information transfer. . .The complexity-matching effect in the Sun–Earth network is evident in the equality of the inverse power-law indices.”
Solar Cycles
“the average global temperature record presents secular patterns of 22-and 11-year cycles and a short timescale fluctuation signature (with apparent inverse power-law statistics), both of which appear to be induced by solar dynamics.”
Could you comment on which if any have been confirmed, or explicitly countered? It would appear that researchers would first have to be skilled in the mathematics and complexity physics that Scafett and West apply.
The MRF is still showing a Fall signal for NA. The forecasted cut-off low in the Central Plains will be followed by a sharp trough on the 23rd with lows in the low 50s for the upper plains and as far south as the OK panhandle. The Arctic is projected to be below 32 degrees for several days.
This looks more like late Sept than Late August.
Pamela,
“These kinds of temps this early in the fall ”
From my understanding, autumn (fall to you vocabulary challenged North Americans) doesn’t start until September in the NH. So what you are describing is a fairly cold ending to the last fortnight or so of the NH summer. Looking forward to winter?? 🙂
I think the weather in the land of Oz is returning to that of the previous negative PDO period up to the mid to late 70s. I suspect you are getting some of the same. When I was a kid in Sydney we sometimes had layers of ice on containers of water outside overnight in Winter. But the positive PDO cancelled that out for 30+ years. So negative PDO plus negative “whatever” from the Sun sounds like “throw another dog on the fire” weather for quite some time to come.
I put a temperature gauge in my oven yesterday because I kept burning my dinner when I set the oven for 350. Turns out the oven is hotter by 50 degrees. But what continues to fascinate me is that while my oven or stove element is red hot in a matter of seconds, it takes a while to burn food. The other thing that intrigues me is that with just a few degrees of change in heat, candy comes out soft and chewy or hard enough to break teeth.
I think it is very possible that stable measures of the Sun (like cosmic rays or TSI) are like the elements in my oven or on my stove. It takes a while to fry the basketball we call Earth. The Sun doesn’t change by much, but the constant beating or cooling of its many different rays changes the Earth’s temperature. Else why do I find my fanny freezing at 5:00 AM in the summer time when just 6 hours earlier I was kicking covers off? And why am I fretting about cutting enough wood in time for old man winter when the Sun’s rays hit me with only a fleeting glance instead of straight on?
How can anyone say with a straight face that the Sun has no real effect on temperature? If it has such a dramatic affect on cyclic cosmic rays, poles versus equatorial heat, Summer versus Winter, wheat versus no wheat, two cuttings versus three cuttings of alfalfa hay, grapes versus no grapes, and CO2 measures, why is it then summarily disregarded as a main climate driver?
You disregard it because you don’t understand the mechanism? That would be like me standing in front of my oven or stove clueless as to why my food is burning, staring at a dial that eludes me as to its purpose, thinking IT’S MY FAULT! Or thinking that my caramels turned into hard candy because I was BREATHING TOO MUCH!
Look, I don’t know exactly why turning the dial on my oven changes the temperature of the element thus keeping me from buring the roast, or that watching the candy thermometer like a hawk leads to chewy caramels instead of rock candy, I just know that it does.
I don’t need to know or understand the mechanism to state that a constant temperature eventually changes the state of food.
Paul Clark:
“Do you have a URL of a regularly updated data source? ”
For cosmic ray data I look at this Russian site:
http://cr0.izmiran.rssi.ru/mosc/main.htm
If you click on the [Monthly] button you get a good graph over several SS cycles. Haven’t looked for raw data availability though. Interestingly, Lief has mentioned that every second sunspot cycle usually gives a sharp peak due to magnetic polarity cf earths own polarity. And one was due for this cycle changeover. However the peak has stayed very flat at high levels for the last two+ years – coincident with the observed downturn in global temps. As for the reason why? Correlates well with the extended SS minimum in my mind (old an feeble as it is 🙂
I’ve got it! This is how the AGW pantomime can bow out gracefully… “New evidence is appearing that the Sun is likely to go through a prolonged quiet phase now, and temperatures may even start to fall a little. Although of course, CO2 does unquestionably cause global warming, this is clearly of less significance if the sun is quiet and the earth cools again, as seems likely to be the case for at least the next ten years… It is clear that we can revise the current IPCC predictions owing to this new change of solar activity… clearly there is no longer the urgency for which IPCC was originally convened…”
John Miller (05:03:23) :
why do the sunspot numbers on solarcycle24.com disagree with the numbers we’re discussing?
The ‘American’ sunspot number, Ra, used by solarcycle24.com is available in real time, while the ‘International’ sunspot number, Ri, is only available at the end of the month. Typically Ra is 50% larger than Ri.
When I look at days and days of a spotless sun in the SOHO archives and yet, when the chart (http://www.dxlc.com/solar/images/solar.gif) shows we had ten spots in mid July, I have to wonder what I’m missing.
You are missing that the sunspot number is defined as R = 10*G + S, where G is the number of ‘groups’ of spots, and S is the number of spots. So if there was only one spot on the Sun, G would be 1 and S would be 1, and thus R = 10*1 + 1 = 11. If we had two spots close to each other, G would [likely] be 1, S = 2, and R = 10*1 + 2 = 12. If the two spots were far apart, G would be 2 and R = 10*2 + 2 = 22.
matt v. (05:57:12) :
In L.N. Makarova’s second paper called A NEW APPROACH TO THE GLOBAL ELECTRIC CIRCUIT CONCEPTION , he states
The increasing of temperature of middle atmosphere is a result of atmosphere heating by elecrtric current. Our preliminary numerical estimations show that under typical atmospheric conditions the Joule heating of the stratosphere by the current is comparable with rate of heating by the Sun ultra violet radiation in the ozone layer.
I think that she overstates her case as there are not enough ions to carry such a current, but I would be interested in what you find out.
moptop (06:00:56) :
I don’t have any problem with people giving opinions outside of their specialties, I strongly object to the assignment of credibility to one side and denial to the other in accounts of those opinions.
Credibility is always in the eye of the beholder and cannot be assigned.
David L. Hagen (07:11:43) :
Complexity Matching
“the Sun’s influence on Earth’s temperature is subtle because it is not
just an energy transport process but also an information transfer. . .The complexity-matching effect in the Sun–Earth network is evident in the equality of the inverse power-law indices.”
In my book, the mere equality of such indices does not constitute cause.
Solar Cycles
“the average global temperature record presents secular patterns of 22-and 11-year cycles and a short timescale fluctuation signature (with apparent inverse power-law statistics), both of which appear to be induced by solar dynamics.”
‘appear to be induced’ ? is a weak case. Induced by what mechanism? Scafetta and West’s paper does not stand out over the thousands of other papers that claim a solar-climate relation. Their paper has not been confirmed AFAIK nor explicitly countered. The latter presumably because, as I said, the are thousands of such papers and why should one bother with this one and not the others?
In any case, one can disagree with me on this, but they have not made their case strongly enough in my opinion for me to sit up and take notice.
Doug Jones (09:05:26) :
every second sunspot cycle usually gives a sharp peak due to magnetic polarity cf earths own polarity. And one was due for this cycle changeover. However the peak has stayed very flat at high levels for the last two+ years
Be careful not to over-interpret this. The theory does not say it should be peaked, just that the modulation should be different [the precise details we can discuss separately] from the rounded transitions. The sharpness of the earlier peaks is an artifact of the transitions being short.
I don’t know of a single scientist or fellow “denier” who claims that TSI all by itself is the major driver of climate.
The claim is that TSI is a proxy for other solar factors.
If you want to demolish someone’s argument, it helps if you start by understanding their argument.
Anyone else spot the flaw in this argument.
TSI alone is not enough to account for the measured warming of the last 100 years.
Therefore it must be CO2 that has caused the warmin.
The sun produces less energy in the UV range during a minima. The amount by which UV varies is greater than the amount TSI varies.
UV light is responsible for creating the ozone layer. Less UV, less ozone.
Other changes in the sun allow more cosmic rays to reach the earth. Cosmic rays break down ozone.
Ozone is another greenhouse gas.
Is it possible that this is another mechanism by which changes in the sun result in changes in the earth’s climate?
DR (18:14:49) : ,
There are more than 8 solar cycles in the record. Do you know why the model only verified using the last 8?
One possibility that comes to mind is that the model uses an input that was not being recorded during earlier parts of the record.
“And before we go off half cocked on a “great leap forward” on energy, perhaps we ought to actually get our facts straight, not pretend that we have them straight.”
Dr. Hansen is now claiming that we are about to hit a tipping point, and if we don’t start doing something right now, the results will be catastrophic and unstoppable.
Sounds to me like the alarmists are quite aware that the data is not going there way, and are getting desperate to get their political agenda enacted before the whole act starts coming apart.
Pamela Gray (09:00:22) :
How can anyone say with a straight face that the Sun has no real effect on temperature? If it has such a dramatic affect on cyclic cosmic rays, poles versus equatorial heat, Summer versus Winter, wheat versus no wheat, two cuttings versus three cuttings of alfalfa hay, grapes versus no grapes, and CO2 measures, why is it then summarily disregarded as a main climate driver?
Pam, you forgot to mention the dramatic difference between day and night. Generally, the effects you mention are due to the Earth: it is round, its axis is tilted, it is rotating. Make the Earth flat, right its axis to be perpendicular to the orbital plane, and stop its rotation and those effects would just disappear. The dismissal of the Sun as a driver of climate is based on the Sun not varying enough to account for the variations of the climate that we are seeing.
Small periodic changes can cause a much larger output in a target system, if the periodicity happens to hit one of the harmonic frequencies in the target system.
Does the solar cycle match one of the harmonic frequencies of the earth’s climate system? Nobody knows. However, such speculations can’t be dismissed by just declaring that we already know that CO2 is the only factor that matters.
Here is my update I did have it wrong they are protons at 1 GeV that penetrates to the troposphere.
See here page 19 from Gopalswamy presentation.
http://cosray.phys.uoa.gr/SEE2007/Presentations_files/Session%20C/see2007_cme_gopalswamy.pdf
You can see from the links that show that CME’s and the solar wind do change the weather patterns and that the CME’s do effect the lower atmosphere through magnetic and by protons.
More on Angular Momentum, LOD and Solar wind
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/03/030306075514.htm
http://maia.usno.navy.mil/
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/news/2005ScienceMeeting/presentations/thur_am/Perry_Mississippi_River.pdf
http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast08dec98_1.htm
http://www.wettzell.ifag.de/veranstaltungen/fgs/workshop2004/abstracts/FGS2004_deViron_abstract.pdf
Leif….
You claim that solar variation has demonstrated no real detectable link to temperature variations, yet how do you explain that La Ninas and lower global temperatures have occurred around every solar minimum in the past century? 2008, 1996, 1985, 1975, 1965, 1955…if solar minimum by itself has a correlation with temperatures, then why wouldn’t weaker overall cycles as well (I believe there is also correlation here, but it is masked more by decadal oceanic cycles).
MarkW (09:39:55) :
I don’t know of a single scientist or fellow “denier” who claims that TSI all by itself is the major driver of climate.
The claim is that TSI is a proxy for other solar factors.
For you and your fellow deniers suffice it to say that as TSI goes so go all the other factors. It doesn’t matter that their variations are larger. If factor X varied ten times as much as TSI, if TSI now is what it was 100 years ago, then factor X now is also what it was 100 years ago.
MarkW (09:42:31) :
Anyone else spot the flaw in this argument.
TSI alone is not enough to account for the measured warming of the last 100 years. Therefore it must be CO2 that has caused the warming.
You tell us what the flaw is, since you seem to have figured it out.
Pamela- “And why am I fretting about cutting enough wood in time for old man winter when the Sun’s rays hit me with only a fleeting glance instead of straight on?”
Hi Pamela, interesting points, maybe you need a new oven!
The atmosphere has a massive effect on how we feel the heat from the sun. Simply explained the main reason why the sun feels much cooler in the winter is because the solar radiation has to pass through a lot more atmosphere to get here as it is lower in the sky and most of the main carrier of the heat, UV,is absorbed (blocked) by good old oxygen. Reading many of the posts it seems that the importance of the atmosphere on global heat is underestimated. Where there is no atmosphere, such as the moon there is either hot or very cold, depending if you are in the sun or not. As the atmosphere is so important it is safe to conclude that the contents of the atmosphere are as important including , of course, CO2.
Off course the sum is important but small changes in the atmosphere will have more effect on global temperatures than small changes in solar output, if Solar output was more important would’t we see an 11 year patteren of cooloing and warming on Earth?
Jim Arndt (10:17:32) :
You can see from the links that show that CME’s and the solar wind do change the weather patterns and that the CME’s do effect the lower atmosphere through magnetic and by protons. […]
http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast08dec98_1.htm
The 1 Gev events are very, very rare, and therefore not significant climate drivers. I just picked a random one of your links [shown above] and read it, it does not say ANYTHING about the weather nor the climate.
Jared (10:36:35) :
You claim that solar variation has demonstrated no real detectable link to temperature variations, yet how do you explain that La Ninas and lower global temperatures have occurred around every solar minimum in the past century?
La Ninas occur every 5 to 6 years or so without any strict period. My birthday has occurred at every solar minimum in the past 2/3 century. How do explain that? 🙂
Jared, here is a list of La Ninas:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ensoyears.shtml
note the La Ninas in the solar maximum years 1968,1970-71, 1988-89, and 199-2000
P.S. I also had birthdays in those years.
La Nina in 1999-2000, sorry for the typo. Also note that El Ninos are generally flanking the La Ninas [and vice versa] . It seems that what goes up [down] must go down [up].