Many people that have have an interest in the interaction between the Sun and Earth have been keeping a watchful eye on several metrics of solar activity recently. The most popular of course has been sunspot watching.
The sun has been particularly quiet in the last several months, so quiet in fact that Australia’s space weather agency recently revised their solar cycle 24 forecast, pushing the expected date for a ramping up of cycle 24 sunspots into the future by six months.
On August 31st, at 23:59 UTC, just a little over 24 hours from now, we are very likely to make a bit of history. It looks like we will have gone an entire calendar month without a sunspot. According to data from NOAA’s National Geophysical Data Center, the last time that happened was in June of 1913. May of 1913 was also spotless.
With the current space weather activity level of the Sun being near zero, and the SOHO holographic imaging of the far side of the sun showing no developing spots that would come around the edge in the next 24 hours, it seems a safe bet to conclude that August 2008 will be the first spotless month since June 1913.
Here is the sun today, at 09:14UTC August 30th:
Click for a very large image
Some people who watch the sun regularly might argue that August wasn’t really spotless, because on August 21st, a very tiny plage area looked like it was going to become a countable sunspot. Here is an amateur astronomer’s photo of the event:
August 21st, 2008 spots – Photo: Pavol Rapavy
But according to solar physicist Leif Svalgaard, who regularly frequents this blog:
According to NOAA it was not assigned a number on Aug.21st nor on Aug.22.
So without an official recognition or a number assigned, it should not be counted in August as actual sunspot.
It has also been over a month since a countable sunspot has been observed, the last one being on July 18th. Since then, activity has been flat. Below is a graph of several solar metrics from the amateur radio propagation website dxlc.com for the past two months:
Click image for original source
They have a table of metrics that include sunspots, and their data also points to a spotless August 2008. See it here: http://www.dxlc.com/solar/indices.html
So unless something dramatic happens on the sun in the next 24 hours, it seems a safe bet that August 2008 will be a spotless month.
Update: As commenter Jim Powell points out,
There was a stretch of 42 spotless days from 9/13/1996 to 10/24/1996. Today we have equaled this period. Check out Jan Janssens spotless days page http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/Spotless/Spotless.html.
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11+31+8 = 50
Right?
was the next historical number 54?
yes it is feb-apr 1879
then 69 days mar-may 1901
9-12-2008 then
9-26-2008
LOL we well see
What this seems to suggest to me, Tim, is that we are in the process of reaching back 100 yrs or better for comparisons. And while this site ( http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/Spotless/Spotless.html )
has two different cycle pattern groups, there is nothing to say that the next one will be the SC10-SC15 group repeated. It may be entirely different.
Ribht now SC24 coming up doesn’t match anything in the SC16-SC23 group.
We’ve blown right through that dataset.
Look at the Main Characteristics per Solar Cycle on the
http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/Spotless/Spotless.html
page.
With a tentative April 2009 as SC24 start, we are going to make it into the older group with 63 months since SC23max. And no doubt easily 500 spotless days if thing keep chugging along as they did the last 2 months.
No spots on the sun since july 20th.I make that 8 weeks and one day without a sunspot. Is that 57 days?
Solar energy is behind photosynthesis and so would low photosynthesis due to low light would mean less co2 being taken upo by plants and more global warming?
April 2009 as a start date for solar cycle means winter 2008 will be a bit frozen.
Already in Europe we’ve had two really bad summers.
[…] As for what’s up with the sunspots: sunspot cycle 24 began in January of 2008 with the appearance of a sunspot with the opposite magnetic polarity of those in the previous cycle. By August 2008, the sunspot count dropped to zero. See Sun poised to make history with first spotless month since 1913. […]