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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Leif Svalgaard,
Rather than adjust past numbers, we can calibrate present numbers by employing the techniques used in the past. The past instruments and their capabilites are known; we can employ them, or modern day analogues, to observe over a period of time, and then use those numbers to correlate current, more sensitive counts, to the older counts. This way, we do not do the Hann trick of “adjusting” past data and do not throw away the advantage of modern sensitivty. We will be able to produce an homogenous historical record, though.
This can be done for technologies available at different periods. It is a simple, yet elegant, experiment.
As to funding, do like Yon and Totten do for their funding in independant journalism of war in the mid-East: Get a Paypal account and ask for donations. 5000 donations of $20 goes a long way. I will donate a hundred.
That should read:
This way, we do not do the Hansen trick..
Alec Rawls (16:56:07) :
Now turning to some of the science instead of the silly NewScientist discussion of who assumed what.
No, it does not have to be the result of greenhouse gases. It seems to be the result of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Svensmark has it nailed. His graphic near the end of my post here.
I am sympathetic to the PDO, but not to the notion that it caused by the GCRs [or their purported influence on clouds].
It is GCR that can be measured directly in the geologic record
First, please don’t refer to it as the geological record, maybe glaciologic record or biological record [for 14C]. No Geology there.
Second, the GCRs are NOT measured directly. They create 10Be which is washed out by weather and rain and transported to the poles by wind, so the deposition of 10Be in the ice depends not only on the GCRs, but also on the weather and especially on the sulphuric acid aerosols, so volcanic eruptions have a heavy influence on the 10Be record. So, no ‘direct’ link there. Important to get little facts correct. We have temperature and PDO records and GCR records [or their proxies 10BE and 14C] going much further back than what Svensmark shows for his plot. The PDO [e.g. Steve Hare’s that you show] back to 1900 does not vary as the GCRs did back to then, hence my reluctance to attach weight to the notion that the PDO is GCR-controlled.
Robert Bateman (17:31:25) :
But I do agree that AGW is not a lone consequence nor a superior driver of Earths’s climate, but simply another factor in a sea of factors.
Put in the word ‘small’ somewhere there and we may agree better.
Robert Wood (17:39:02) :
Rather than adjust past numbers, we can calibrate present numbers by employing the techniques used in the past. The past instruments and their capabilites are known; we can employ them, or modern day analogues, to observe over a period of time, and then use those numbers to correlate current, more sensitive counts, to the older counts
Is being done by many, many amateurs, One is even using Rudolf Wolfs very own telescope from 1859.
This way, we do not do the Hann trick of “adjusting” past data
We would still have to do that to use the past data as it is already inhomogeneous and MUST be cleaned up first.
We will be able to produce an homogenous historical record, though
And in a few centuries will have something comparable to the historical record. There is nothing inherently wrong in ‘adjusting’ [in spite of the bad press that word has] if done correctly and impartially [no letting the fox loose in the hen-house], and the good news is that it can be done [I for one is willing to spend a good chunk of my time on it]
As to funding, do like Yon and Totten do for their funding in independant journalism of war in the mid-East: Get a Paypal account and ask for donations. 5000 donations of $20 goes a long way. I will donate a hundred.
Well, I do have a paypal account leif@leif.org but I’m not sure it will bring in enough to sustain this effort [we are not talking about a few days or weeks of work – it will take many months, perhaps years].
“The Central England Temperature series [which matches quite well similar series from Europe] goes back to 1659. You can see it here http://www.leif.org/research/CET2.png .”
That’s bad. Here’s a better one, and with an official stamp:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/graphs/HadCET_graph_ylybars_uptodate.gif
Colder than the dickens from 1800 to 1820, then a short warming 10 year or so reprieve and a couple warm summers, followed by a drop to frigid temps from 1830 to 1840. The warm spell could be explained by ocean circulation patterns, etc.
Alec Rawls, I see your point and almost entirely agree. Without mechanism, though, correlation does not prove causality. It’s faith to believe otherwise, and Leif is as neutral as a scientist should be. You can see that he’s skeptical about CO2=AGW and he scoffs at the IPCC. Leif insists on the mechanism because knowing that is the only way to properly inform policy.
====================================
My opinion, of course. Leif’s mileage may vary.
==============================
Glenn (18:11:15) :
“The Central England Temperature series[…]”
That’s bad. Here’s a better one, and with an official stamp
Mine shows the actually measured temperatures, not anomalies from some recent high point. And comes from here http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/CR_data/Daily/HadCET_act.txt with the appropriate official stamp, so is not bad. You just couldn’t help yourself, could you :-). The cold in the 1810s is due to volcanic eruptions, not the Sun. Note how the 1850s-1860s were a lot colder [on either graph] than last twenty years despite almost identical solar activity.
Glenn (18:11:15) :
Colder than the dickens from 1800 to 1820, then a short warming 10 year or so reprieve and a couple warm summers, followed by a drop to frigid temps from 1830 to 1840. The warm spell could be explained by ocean circulation patterns, etc.
And the cold spells not? This works both ways.
“And the cold spells not? This works both ways.”
I didn’t say that. Most all of this “works both ways”. That is the problem with
trying to guess what the complex system of Earth climate is doing at any time at specific locations. Robert offered the Lewis & Clark expedition being a cold period in North America, and you poo pooed that with “If the Sun is the culprit then one would expect the effect on temperature to be global” and what appears now to be a temp anomaly graph of Central England. You should ask yourself the question you just asked me.
“The cold in the 1810s is due to volcanic eruptions, not the Sun.” How about vulcanism and low solar activity? Or is this one where you can have it one way?
Left this out:
“The Dalton Minimum was a period of low solar activity, lasting from about 1790 to 1830 [1]. It is named for the English meteorologist John Dalton. Like the Maunder Minimum and Spörer Minimum it coincided with a period of lower than average global temperatures. Low solar activity seems to be strongly correlated with global cooling.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Minimum
Wiki is a very popular site, Leif. You can be a contributor if you wish.
Glenn (19:30:57) :
“And the cold spells not? This works both ways.”
I didn’t say that.
True, but you were quick to ‘explain the warm spell’ as if needed special explanation, you could also have explained that “the drop to frigid temps from 1830 to 1840 could be explained by ocean circulation patterns, etc.”. Your bias showed itself by trying to explain away the warm spell.
Robert offered the Lewis & Clark expedition being a cold period in North America, and you poo pooed that with “If the Sun is the culprit then one would expect the effect on temperature to be global” and what appears now to be a temp anomaly graph of Central England.
The 1800-1820 were not particularly cold compared to the whole period 1790-1890 except for the years with volcanic eruptions.
How about vulcanism and low solar activity? Or is this one where you can have it one way?
We now have low solar activity [has been going down for a while] and it is now not ‘colder than the dickens’, so yes, I think this one goes my way.
I see that ozone is not well mixed. CO2 is probably not well mixed, water vapor is not well mixed. Therefore the things that cool temps and seed clouds will not act globally, but will act locally. I have a hunch that it matters not that cosmic rays, one potential seeder of water vapor into clouds, may hit Earth in a well mixed and even way at the outer to inner levels of our atmosphere. It seems it would matter how it reacts to the unmixed conditions of our atmosphere. This is why the variation of the Sun is not as important to me as the interaction of the slightly varying Sun with our stew-like atmosphere.
Glenn (19:34:20) :
Wiki is a very popular site, Leif. You can be a contributor if you wish
Wiki says this about ‘Global Warming’:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes “most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gas concentrations”[1] via an enhanced greenhouse effect. Natural phenomena such as solar variation combined with volcanoes probably had a small warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950 and a small cooling effect from 1950 onward.
—-
I take it, then, that you agree with this too. I especially like the “solar variation combined with volcanoes probably had a small warming effect”. Good to know that volcanoes help keeping us warm.
Well, I agree with Wikipedia: That IS what the IPPC says!
#B^1
“We now have low solar activity [has been going down for a while] and it is now not ‘colder than the dickens’, so yes, I think this one goes my way.”
http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/site/sunspot_web.png
Nonsense. Wait for a few years, if the same pattern as the Dalton Minimum emerges. Of course we would be coming down from an all-time high period of solar activity. Furthermore, I’d call the last few months being below or very near the mean baseline “cooling down”. This is global mean temp, Leif. Have a better explanation for the last few months, and as far as that matters the last several years of flat temps? El Nina? CO2 increase?
“Your bias showed itself by trying to explain away the warm spell.”
Again your logic astounds. No, I simply said that ocean circulations or something *could have* caused the spike in temp during the Dalton, *in England*.
Robert Wood (17:15:27) :
Sorry, I didn’t see this one for the fluff:
1. As this sun speck was only really visible in the magnetogram, it appears that sunspots are created by the magnetic anomaly, as these anomalies precede the visual sunspot.
Sunspots are the visual manifestation of a magnetic field stronger than 1500 Gauss [the Earth’s field is 0.5 Gauss]. If the magnetic field is weaker than 1500 G it shows up brighter than the surrounding atmosphere.
2. Are we now going to measure sunspots with magnetic images? This makes the sunspot record discontinuous. To be valid, we must employ a standard for sunspots that is equivalent to the method of recording sunspots over the historical record. Calibration, guys!
We should measure sunspots the way they have always been measured. Unfortunately that is a void statement, because the method changed in 1893 when Wolf died. So we have to ‘splice’ the two pieces together by appropriate calibration.
3. Is there not some time duration required to count as a sunspot, such as a solar rotation, or two observations within a 48 hour period?
No, although NOAA has a 12-hour lifetime requirement for counted it as an ‘active region’. Historically, Wolf and his successors only observed once a day, and Wolf had a subjective
judgment call based on the size of the spot. His successor didn’t like that and counted all spots he could, which is not much better, because different people in different locations with different seeing, see different things.
4. Aren’t these people really clutching at straws? And it was a cycle 23 speck to boot. Ha!
No, they are trying to the best they can [and it is not easy]. Of course, as government employees [or maybe all employees] they try to CYA and hate to admit errors and hide behind bureaucracy [‘this is an official product and cannot be changed’].
5. Following on from (2) above: If we calibrated our observations with those from the 17th and 18th century (a not impossible task) then we could make a guesstimate (engineering term for SWAG) of the unseen sun-specks during that period.
yes, but we have to include the 19th and 20th centuries as well, because they need to be re-calibrated as well. And it is possible to do the re-calibration [I’m working on it 🙂 ]. A major obstacle is that many folks don’t want a correctly calibrated series because of possible conflicts with their ideas derived from or supported by the flawed series.
“I take it, then, that you agree with this too.”
Why yes, I agree that the IPCC concludes these things. Again your logic astounds.
evanjones (20:01:22) :
Well, I agree with Wikipedia: That IS what the IPPC [sic] says!
Anybody reading that Wiki entry comes away with the impression that IPCC’s is an objective assessment of the situation as it “has been endorsed by at least 30 scientific societies and academies of science,[4] including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries.[5][6][7] While individual scientists have voiced disagreement with some findings of the IPCC,[8] the overwhelming majority of scientists working on climate change agree with the IPCC’s main conclusions.”
The individual scientists [and by extension all AGW skeptics] are almost represented as some loonies on the fringe.
I’ll be specific and not split hairs: “That Wiki entry is one-sided”.
“I’ll be specific and not split hairs: “That Wiki entry is one-sided”.”
Must be, for you: “Low solar activity seems to be strongly correlated with global cooling.”
Anthropogenic Solar Chaos – ASC. Man is causing an upset in the sun. We’ve seen the recent move to the term chaos over warming as you can now claim any change, up down or sideways.
But, as we begin to acknowledge that it is the sun that most influences the earth’s climate, we need to now find the path to show that it is man that actually is impacting the solar output! Then we can regulate, control and tax that specific action of man.
One proposed item is cell phones. The magnetic field disruption caused by our cell phones. There is a direct correlation between decreasing sun spots over the last 5 years and the increasing number of cell phones. Direct.
Better yet, another is negative thoughts of people. Thus, we can now cap and trade in thoughts. We can tax thoughts. There is a proven correlation between the increased number of negative thoughts over the last 5 years and the decreasing number of sun spots.
Glenn (20:18:13) :
“Why yes, I agree that the IPCC concludes these things. Again your logic astounds.”
Wiki goes on to say [and this is not in quotation marks:
Natural phenomena such as solar variation combined with volcanoes probably had a small warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950 and a small cooling effect from 1950 onward.
A far cry from solar heat being a major climate driver. So, since Wiki says that natural phenomena have ‘probably’ caused a small cooling since 1950, you must then agree with them [assuming that you always agree with Wiki] that any increase since 1950 is not caused by natural phenomena.
Of course we would be coming down from an all-time high period of solar activity.
No, solar activity the last few cycles was not an all-time high as we have discussed.
Have a better explanation for the last few months, and as far as that matters the last several years of flat temps? El Nina? CO2 increase?
Simple internal oscillations of a complex system.
“Your bias showed itself by trying to explain away the warm spell.”
Again your logic astounds. No, I simply said that ocean circulations or something *could have* caused the spike in temp during the Dalton, *in England*.
By the same token, ocean circulations ‘could have’ caused the cold weather [apart from that caused by the volcanoes.
nonein2008 (20:44:33) :
Anthropogenic Solar Chaos – ASC. Man is causing an upset in the sun. […]There is a proven correlation between the increased number of negative thoughts over the last 5 years and the decreasing number of sun spots.
Hurry, hurry, write a Wikipedia entry. We need all those good and strong correlations documented where the unwashed masses can find them.
“Wiki goes on to say [and this is not in quotation marks:”
It’s called paraphrasing, Leif.
Glenn (21:13:23) :
It’s called paraphrasing, Leif.
You evaded answering if you agree with the paraphrased:
“Natural phenomena such as solar variation combined with volcanoes probably had a small warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950 and a small cooling effect from 1950 onward.”