After the August 21st sunspot debacle where SIDC reported a spot and initially NOAA didn’t, mostly due to the report from the Catania Observatory in Italy, we have another similar situation. On September 11th, a plage area developed. Here is the SOHO MDI for 1323UTC:
Find the sunspot in this image – Click for a larger image
Here is another from a couple hours later, 1622UTC :
Find the sunspot in this image – Click for a larger image
Note that in the large versions of both the above images, you’ll see a tiny black speck. That’s NOT the “sunspot” but burned out pixels on the SOHO CCD imager.
To help you locate the area of interest, here is the SOHO magnetogram for the period, as close as one is available to the above image time. It shows the disturbance with the classic N-S polarity of solar cycle 23 close to the equator:
Click for a larger image
The Catania Observatory in Italy included it on their daily sketch, as barely visible:
Click for a larger image
By contrast, the Mount Wilson Observatory in California did NOT show this on their daily drawing:
Click for larger image
The Catania photosphere image for that period did not show any disturbance:
Click for larger image
But the Catania chromosphere image did show the disturbance:
Click for a larger image
At the time our resident solar physicist Leif Svaalgard postulated and then retracted:
Leif Svalgaard (17:40:36)
Leif Svalgaard (07:06:37) :
BTW, right now Catania is seeing a pair of tiny spots at 7 degree North latitude (these are old cycle 23 spots): http://www.ct.astro.it/sun/draw.jpg
I don’t think NOAA will assign a region number to these spots unless the region grows in size.
Well, I guessed wrong:
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/forecasts/SRS/0912SRS.txt:
I. Regions with Sunspots. Locations Valid at 11/2400Z
Nmbr Location Lo Area Z LL NN Mag Type
1001 N06E14 179 0020 Bxo 03 02 Beta
Please welcome cycle 23 region 11001.
And then a few minutes later went on to say:
Leif Svalgaard (18:35:44)
Leif Svalgaard (17:40:36) :
Please welcome cycle 23 region 11001.
REPLY: The MDI hardly shows it at all. – Anthony
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/mdi_igr/1024/l
I would say not at all, And Mt. Wilson neither:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~obs/intro.html
Kitt Peak NSO had it:
The region died sometime between 17h and 20h UT. One may wonder why this Tiny Tim was elevated to an ‘active region’. Perhaps NOAA is getting nervous now after all the brouhaha and don’t want to be accused of ‘missing’ spots…
Anyway, it is now gone.
And Robert Bateman added:
Robert Bateman (21:45:42)
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/latest/DSD.txt
NOAA gave it a go.
2008 09 11 67 12 20 1 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
So let’s recap:
We have a disturbance that shows up briefly, then disappears in a couple of hours, some observers call it a spot, others do not, or their time of observation (Mt. Wilson for example) was perhaps past the time of visible activity. The “spot” itself is even less pronounced than the sunspeck that was elevated to sunspot status on August 21st, yet NOAA assigns it a spot status this time, where on August 21st they did not, only doing so AFTER the SIDC came out with their monthly report on September 1st. See my report about that event here and the follow up email I got from SIDC when I questioned the issue.
Now 100 + years ago would we have recorded this as a spot? Doubtful. It is most pronounced on imagery from satellite or specialized telescopes. Would the old methods such as a dark filter or projection used 100 years ago have seen this? As I pointed out before, we now have a non-homogeneous sunspot record mixing old techniques and instrumentation with new and much more sensitive instrumentation, and more coverage. Yet even with this we have disagreement between observatory reports.
How long does a sunspeck (or sunspot) have to be present before it ranks as countable? What standards are in place to ensure that observers use the same type of equipment and techniques to count spots? Is there any such standard? From the perspective of the public and laymen at large, it seems that there’s some randomness to this science process.
In my opinion, science would be better served if these observational questions and the dataset inhomogeneity is addressed.
I’m sure Leif will have some commentary to add.
And as Robert Bateman writes in comments: So, we are still having these SC23 bubbles popping up. Why won’t this cycle give it up? The $64k question.
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SIDC has issued a Clarification of what the Sunspot Number means and how they measure it:
http://sidc.oma.be/news/106/welcome.html
“You tell me, or if at a loss for words, go over to tamino http://tamino.wordpress.com/ or realclimate http://www.realclimate.org/ for a refresher :-)”
Now that is a low blow.
Leif wrote: “SIDC has issued a Clarification…”
well that’s something at least, though it still seems to be a bit of wagon circling…
The real question is of course justification of events like August 21st.
Gary Gulrud (08:37:11) :
“You tell me, or if at a loss for words, go over to tamino http://tamino.wordpress.com/ or realclimate http://www.realclimate.org/ for a refresher :-)”
Now that is a low blow.
As was appropriate.
wattsupwiththat (08:47:07) :
The real question is of course justification of events like August 21st.
Snafus happen. They have, of course – in sticking to their rigid procedure, not removed the sunspot counts from the Southern Hemisphere. Without the wrong count there, the sunspot number for August should be 0.3 and not 0.5 [granted, that that doesn’t make a whit of difference].
More alarming to me is the NOAA count on 9/11 as that speck should not have been counted according to their own procedures [too short-lived]. Some panic reaction? Anyway, I guess that the lesson of all this is that this is tricky business with an error bar as so much else, and not to attach too much symbolic importance to the ‘zero count’ [admittedly hard not to].
Pamela,
If you were to assert that there is a ‘conversation’ between the sun and the oceans then I’d agree with the bulk of your picturesque description.
Sometimes the oceans supplement solar changes, sometimes they oppose them and at other times changes in oceanic influence balance out solar changes for a while.
See my various articles on this link, especially the one about the Hot Water Bottle Effect.
http://co2sceptics.com/news.php?tag=stephen+wilde
I agree, Leif, the 9/11 sunspot is a total reach, maybe it only deserves an 0.1 or an 0.05?
If we round down, it’s a zero.
We all watched as the smoke from the fires in No. Ca laid low all summer, and the answer came straight from the Fire Infomation Officer who got her briefing from NASA: Cosmic Rays hitting the lower atmosphere in the UV and creating the inversion layer. Only the winds dislodged the smoke, which travelled halfway down the state under the ‘layer’.
The fire people couldn’t believe what was happening. They never saw anthiing like it.
OT: To keep this on our collective minds, as of Sept 19th, we are only about 10 days away from the next milestone of 446 for solar minima spotless days. We may hit that next milestone by the end of this month.
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/08/13/spotless-days-400-and-counting/
July had 3 or 4, and I think Aug 21, 22 each had a small sunspot, so I count 6 since June 30. Am I missing any? “Region 1001 (N06, L =
179, class/area Bxo/020 on 11 September) emerged on 11 September,
but quickly decayed to plage.” (see http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/latest/WKHF.txt ) Does that one count? The http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/indices/DSD.txt page gave it an SESC Sunspot number of 12 and area of 20 x10^-6 Hemis, but that page does not have a sunspot number for Aug 21 nor 22.
Taking 4 for july, 2 for August and 1 for sept, I get 436 so far.
Before it is lost:
:Product: Daily Solar Data DSD.txt
:Issued: 1425 UT 19 Sep 2008
#
# Prepared by the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, NOAA, Space Weather Prediction Center
# Please send comments and suggestions to SWPC.Webmaster@noaa.gov
#
# Last 30 Days Daily Solar Data
#
# Sunspot Stanford GOES10
# Radio SESC Area Solar X-Ray —— Flares ——
# Flux Sunspot 10E-6 New Mean Bkgd X-Ray Optical
# Date 10.7cm Number Hemis. Regions Field Flux C M X S 1 2 3
#—————————————————————————
2008 08 20 66 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2008 08 21 67 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2008 08 22 68 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2008 08 23 68 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2008 08 24 67 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2008 08 25 67 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2008 08 26 67 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2008 08 27 67 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2008 08 28 66 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2008 08 29 67 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2008 08 30 67 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2008 08 31 67 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
John M Reynolds
Email from Roger Ulrich of Mt. Wilson Solar Observatory:
I have prepared the paragraphs below to indicate my evaluation of the magnetic field/ CaK spectroheliogram history of solar activity during three solar minima.
A set of pretty large pdf files for the 1933/34 and 1954 minima can be found at:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~ulrich/MW_SPADP/CaK_RM_flat_sum/
in case anyone wants to review these earlier minima. This page is not linked to any active pages but can be accessed by the above.
I have looked at the current minimum and the minima preceding cycles 17 and 19. It is a bit difficult to be precise in this comparison because of the different sizes of magnetized regions on the solar surface. The operating active sun almost always has a magnetized region or several on its surface at any given time. Often the sun is unbalanced with an active region on one side and not on the other. During all three minima there are episodic times when very small features appear for one to several days. These features are much smaller than are the typical active regions. I think I have to count the time of quiet minimum as that period between the last region is seen and when the next region is seen. The small features confuse the description because they have been seen during the quiet minimum phase for all three minima but they are distributed in time differently in each case [I don’t know what he means by this – Leif]. If I just take the intervals between last region and first region as the quiet period the interval of cycle 16/17 was from 11/27/1933 to 2/10/1934 with marginally large feature/region present from 1/12/1934 to 1/18/1934, approximately 2.5 months. The quiet period for cycles 18/19 was from 4/19/1954 to 8/29/1954 (just over 4 months) with the month of June, 1954 being extremely quiet. The present quiet period began June 27, 2008 and is continuing so we are coming up to 3 months. The current month of September is so far as quiet as was June 1954.
The current quiet period is unusual but not unprecedented. It is on the edge of setting a record but not there yet.
SPACE WEATHER, VOL. 6, S09006, doi:10.1029/2008SW000440, 2008
Sunspot Record Reveals Little to Space Weather Watchers
Irene Klotz
Abstract
Despite a month of nearly spot-free conditions on the surface of the Sun, solar physicists with NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who keep a sharp eye on solar activities to forecast space weather, are no closer to assessing the nature of the next sunspot cycle.
Published 20 September 2008.
There is a very small ‘spot’ SC24, at high latitude North, right now. Let’s see who dares count it.
Leif (19:59:24) Isn’t it visible on the magnetogram, but not to the eye?
==========================================
kim (20:44:44) :
Isn’t it visible on the magnetogram, but not to the eye?
It is visible to the eye looking through an appropriate telescope, e.g. SOHO’s:
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/mdi_igr/1024/latest.html
I didn’t read all the comments because I’ve been behind, and 246 is a pile to read anyway. I’m surprised by the attack on the solar observers, saying that a “speck” or “tim” shouldn’t be a spot, and trying to condemn said observers to use antiquated technologies. If the solar observers are to use refracting telescopes with filters for visual observing, then the temperature observers should go back to using whatever they were using back in the day, to avoid contaminating the record.
I’m a little disappointed that this science blog has seemed to take a step into “activism” territory. The solar observations don’t match what was expected/hoped for by the temperature crew, and now that crew is complaining bitterly to get the record corrected so it suits their needs. The whole thing seems to be somewhat hypocritical.
During my short life I’ve learned that nothing stays the same – technology evolves and (usually) makes things better. Just because something was done one way ~100 years ago doesn’t mean we should keep doing it – why doesn’t everyone drive a Model-T or use a graphophone to listen to music?
And instead of just flaming the comments, I’m proposing a solution. If we have technology that can detect a sunspot when our eyes can’t, then we should keep track of that. Perhaps everything (specks/spots/disturbances) should have size, polarization, location, and duration (and temperature?) recorded. By building the solar observance dataset can we analyze that data and get into discussions about what a spot is or isn’t. We can then embrace technological advances that give us more data to analyze because we stand to gain more knowledge from the analysis of those richer datasets.