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.
Glenn (16:46:45) :
Here’s the Bond article, Leif, although I imagine you are familiar with it
Yes, I have discussed this one with him several times. The trouble with this one is that there is power at very many frequencies and by filtering out everything with power at periods longer that 1800 years, you pick out power in a band just below it.
A careful analysis by your ‘heroes’ Usoskin and company comes to this result [no filtering] http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/aa7704-07.pdf:
Grand minima and maxima of solar activity: new observational
constraints.
Usoskin, S. K. Solanki, and G. A. Kovaltsov
Accepted 25 May 2007
Results. The occurrence of grand minima/maxima is driven not by long-term cyclic variability, but by a stochastic/chaotic process[…]
Robert Wood (17:01:54) :
a step change in solar output would take at least 60 years to change then temperature of the oceans; remember the Oceans are an enormous thermal mass.
So, to argue about decadal changes is not very useful. We must be using at 60 smoothing year filters.
Not only a filter, but also a lag of the order of 60 years, but the correlations claimed are without such lags. And there is also no lag in the claim that the last 10 years of cooling is due to the recent decline is solar activity. Just more examples of why the claims are not credible.
Jim Powell (17:03:50) :
Here is a graph of historical sunspots with Bond dates and Encke’s orbit inserted. I used the historical sunspots as a timeline to see if comet impacts caused the major dips in the sunspot record.
Ans as you can see, the Bond events and the 1460-year marks are in phase back to 6000 BT (Before Tunguska], then they drift out of phase and don’t line up anymore as well as the Bond events not matching the sunspot curve anyway.
It is all just too flimsy and shaky to base anything serious on. That is why I as a solar scientist if asked for example at a Congressional Hearing if the solar connection was solid enough to base policy on, would have to [honestly] NO. This does not mean that I’m closed to the idea. On the contrary [it would make my expertise all that much more valuable], I eagerly [as I have done for 40 years] read every scrap of paper announcing yet another solar link, to see if, indeed, ‘this is it’. Alas, I haven’t seen it yet. Often I serve as reviewer of such papers. I reject some [that are just bad], I give the authors a hard time [on the ones that need more work], and I accept some [because the speculation has some merit and might lead to progress in the future].
Derek D (10:20:30) :
I do not intend this to be a political post. It is a language post, as much as I can make it without being diplomatic. 🙂
Software engineers (and engineers in general) hardly ever use the word “all”. I have voted for Libertarians when possible in the last 20 years and my wife has run as one. Enough people read this list daily so “all” is too inclusive. You may have managed to insult all the readers here, if so, well, you can learn to write to annoy just the subset you’re aiming for. I call it finesse. (Others probably say I’m a jerk.)
Please stick to science. If Anthony wanted this to be a political forum he would have included that word at the top of the page.
One possible reason for them drifting out of phase is that Encke crosses paths with an asteroid belt every 10,000. I don’t know when they cross paths last. Over time much of the debris collides with Jupiter and the Sun.
Tunguska occurred at the same time as the beta Taurids and so was probably part of Encke. The timing of the Dark Ages matches up within a few years of Tunguska. The Dark Ages were reported by monks to have been actually darker during the day during the first couple of years. A comet hitting the ocean could have caused this. Younger Dryas was most like the result of a comet piece hitting Canada 12900 years ago. Those are the only dates that I have been able to associate with events.
Another thought I had about Encke was that it would explain why this inter-glacial cycle is flat — jagged topped rather than peaked like the previous 3 inter-glacial cycles. If the chunks were hitting the oceans, a lot of water vapor would be injected into the atmosphere stopping the earth from continuously warming to a peak.
Jim Powell (19:40:31) :
One possible reason for them drifting out of phase is that Encke crosses paths with an asteroid belt every 10,000. I don’t know when they cross paths last. Over time much of the debris collides with Jupiter and the Sun.
One never knows …
“Gentlemen, I would rather believe that two Yankee professors would lie than believe that stones fall from heaven.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1809
Leif: I already cited documentation of the close correlation between solar activity and temperature (in Bond 2001). You can find much more of the same in Singer’s book and in Svensmark’s book. I asked you if you were challenging this relationship, and you advert to the 1500 year warming cycle, claiming there isn’t a corresponding 1500 year solar cycle.
I don’t see how that is an answer. Whether there is or isn’t a 1500 year solar cycle does nothing to challenge the clear solar-temperature correlation on centennial and decadal time scales. Why in the world focus on the possibly evanescent 1500 year cycle? As I quoted from Bond, the correlation on shorter time scales (going back 12,000 years in his case) is very strong. Since such extended correlation can’t be coincidence, it PROVES that solar activity is driving temperature. It may not be the whole story (certainly it isn’t), but it is clearly the biggest source of temperature variation, or the correlations wouldn’t be so consistent.
The lack of a clear 1500 year cycle isn’t much of a counterexample, given that Bond did find SOME such cyclical behavior in solar activity as well. More generally, the fact that there are instances where solar activity and temperature change are not correlated (like the early 1600’s) does not alter the fact that there is a high degree of correlation. It just means that some other things must also be at work, as one would of course expect. Does correlation have to be perfect before you will recognize it?
I still can’t tell whether you are challenging the correlation between solar activity and temperature or dodging it. All you’ve offered is a couple of counterexamples, which don’t seem to add up to much. Still, you’ve been a good sport, which is very nice. If it seems that I’ve been trying to twist your arm, well, only in a good way. I think it is you (not me) who is exchanging the stronger argument against the IPCC’s fraud for the weaker one, and since you are in a much better position to expose their fraud than a layman like me, I just hate to see you trading a .50 BMG for a Tommygun.
Farmers Almanac is soon to be out, and in it, for better or for worse, they are purported to be including the extended solar minima in it. I can’t say that it will be scientific ornot, but I also am not seeing any coverage of this outside of the science circles.
You know what happens: He who gets the story out first is the winner.
What has science got right now on this thing?
Alec Rawls (21:04:58) :
Whether there is or isn’t a 1500 year solar cycle does nothing to challenge the clear solar-temperature correlation on centennial and decadal time scales. Why in the world focus on the possibly evanescent 1500 year cycle?
Simply because you ended with asking if I was trying to debunk Singer’s book [which I have and have read – I also know Fred Singer and he had visited with me when I was at Stanford].
I’m perfectly happy to drop the 1500-year cycle as irrelevant and not established.
I still can’t tell whether you are challenging the correlation between solar activity and temperature or dodging it.
I would never dodge anything. I think you are projecting onto me. We have a proverb in Denmark: “a thief thinks everybody steals”.
In fact, you are dodging my demonstration that it doesn’t have to be either 0%AGW,100%solar or 100%AGW,0%solar, but that the XYZW situation is what we have and that therefore a small Y says nothing about the size of X or vice versa. But, let that slide, I didn’t think you would pick that up anyway.
All you’ve offered is a couple of counterexamples, which don’t seem to add up to much.
You have this backwards, it is up to the one making a claim to show that the claim has merit, not for the opponent to show that it has not. And would you change your mind if I had 10 counterexamples? or 50? or 100? Of course you would not [otherwise I would ask what the ‘tipping point’ number would be, 42 perhaps?].
Still, you’ve been a good sport, which is very nice. If it seems that I’ve been trying to twist your arm, well, only in a good way.
I’m not a good sport. I’m an old cranky scientist that has studied this thing for 40+ years. You cannot twist my arm if you wanted to.
I think […] you are in a much better position to expose their fraud than a layman like me,
No need to do this [or to get hot under the collar], their house of cards will fall all by itself. Science is self-correcting, and twenty years of cooling will do the IPCC in, no matter what causes the cooling. The solar argument is not and should not become a political weapon. It is an unsolved scientific problem that solar scientists have struggled with ever since Giovanni Battista Riccioli first posed it in 1651. Regardless of how convinced you are, the correlations [already to big a word for much of what is claimed] have not convinced me, and that is, of course, for me the overriding issue. I shall therefore oppose such claims, if asked. Now, I have often tried to examine the problem in a scientific manner with a poster, that is: collect some data, look together at the data, put it to statistical tests, etc, but it invariably fizzles out, because the patience and painstaking attention needed are foreign to people, who are not really interested in studying the problem [which is hard work], but just want their opinion confirmed. So it ends up with the silly comedy of dueling references, and then dies away as the parties are exhausted by the nonsense.
Robert Bateman (21:24:26) :
What has science got right now on this thing?
The no-show of cycle 24 portends a very small cycle. And we [Svalgaard, Cliver, and Kamide] predicted a very small cycle [we called it “the smallest in a hundred years”] several years ago, so we are comfortable [ http://www.leif.org/research/Cycle%2024%20Smallest%20100%20years.pdf ]
The Sun is right on track.
Alec Rawls (21:04:58) :
BTW, what happened to the “hundred of thousands of years”. I asked for supporting documentation and got nothing [a dodge, perhaps?]
What happens in your model if the expected minima (2006.8) doesn’t happen?
It would seem to me that if the intent is to predict the height of the following maxima by taking the years before a predicted minima, your model could suffer from picking the wrong years. Once the minima is known, then yes, you have something to work with.
Did I read your work right? My apologies if I am mistaken.
So, if you can come up with a model for cycle LENGTH, you’d have the market cornered.
Robert Bateman (22:23:09) :
What happens in your model if the expected minima (2006.8) doesn’t happen?
The polar fields have been unchanged since 2003, see e.g.
http://www.leif.org/research/Most%20Recent%20IMF,%20SW,%20and%20Solar%20Data.pdf
So as long as they stay the same, it doesn’t matter when the minimum is. The reason that the polar fields stay the same is that there are no new cycle [24] regions eating away at them, but this can go on ‘forever’, as far as I’m concerned.
So, if you can come up with a model for cycle LENGTH, you’d have the market cornered.
I don’t think that is possible because while the build-up of a cycle seems to be an orderly process, the decay is much more random. To give you a feeling for it: there are 3000 active regions in a sunspot cycle. The polar fields that are left over [to form the next cycle] contains the magnetic flux from only about 5 of those, and that could by accident as well be 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 or 7, covering a wide range of possible next cycle sizes [proportional to the polar flux]. Because of this randomness, the decay and therefore the length is almost undetermined, although statistically small cycles tend to be longer, but this is not a firm rule [and may be an artifact of the sunspot number being too low a couple of hundred years ago (when the cycles were about a year longer)]. So, LENGTH is tough.
Leif asks:
That’s right. Of course I would not. The general point I made is that a high degree of correlation between solar activity and temperature change cannot be dismissed just because there are points where it is not found. In a big enough sample, you could find any number of counterexamples. A high degree of correlation still implies causality.
Alec Rawls (22:40:21) :
would you change your mind if I had 10 counterexamples? or 50? or 100? Of course you would not.
That’s right. Of course I would not.
[…]In a big enough sample, you could find any number of counterexamples.
So, I have 10001 time series, one shows what you want, and 10000 show what I want, and they don’t count?
A high degree of correlation still implies causality.
There is a very high correlation between the population of the US and magnetic flux in the solar corona. The census is taken every 10 years and for the 20th century [for which we have magnetic flux data – calculated by Lockwood et al. [Lockwood, M., R. Stamper, & M. N. Wild, A Doubling of the Suns Coronal
Magnetic Field during the Last 100 Years, Nature, 399, 437-439 (1999)]] I calculate the 10-year averages centered on the census years. The correlation coefficient between the two time series is 0.92 [1.00 means perfect correlation]. Causation?
This just in:
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 35, L18701, doi:10.1029/2008GL034864, 2008
How natural and anthropogenic influences alter global and regional surface temperatures: 1889 to 2006
Judith L. Lean, Space Science Division, Naval Research Laboratory,
Washington, D. C., USA
David H. Rind, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NASA,
New York, New York, USA
Abstract
To distinguish between simultaneous natural and anthropogenic impacts on surface temperature, regionally as well as globally, we perform a robust multivariate analysis using the best available estimates of each together with the observed surface temperature record from 1889 to 2006. The results enable us to compare, for the first time from observations, the geographical distributions of responses to individual influences consistent with their global impacts. We find a response to solar forcing quite different from that reported in several papers published recently in this journal, and zonally averaged responses to both natural and anthropogenic forcings that differ distinctly from those indicated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose conclusions depended on model simulations. Anthropogenic warming estimated directly from the historical observations is more pronounced between 45°S and 50°N than at higher latitudes whereas the model-simulated trends have minimum values in the tropics and increase steadily from 30 to 70°N.
The main result is their Table 1:
Table 1. Amplitudes of Global Temperature Trends Arising From Individual Natural and Anthropogenic Influences Determined As the Slopes of the Time Series in Figure 2 Over Different Epochs
1889– 2006:
0.0015 ± 0.0005 ENSO
-0.0009 ± 0.0003 Volcanic Activity
0.007 ± 0.001 Solar Activity
0.050 ± 0.001 Anthropogenic Forcing
100 yrs: 1905– 2005
0.0028 ± 0.0006 ENSO
-0.0029 ± 0.0004 Volcanic Activity
0.007 ± 0.001 Solar Activity
0.059 ± 0.001 Anthropogenic Forcing
0.074 ± 0.018 IPCC [2007]
50 yrs: 1955– 2005
0.015 ± 0.002 ENSO
0.001 ± 0.001 Volcanic Activity
0.002 ± 0.001 Solar Activity
0.136 ± 0.003 Anthropogenic Forcing
0.128 ± 0.026 IPCC [2007]
25 yrs: 1979– 2005
-0.007 ± 0.005 ENSO
0.018 ± 0.004 Volcanic Activity
-0.004 ± 0.004 Solar Activity
0.199 ± 0.005 Anthropogenic Forcing
0.177 ± 0.052 IPCC [2007]
The solar forcing is based on Wang et al.’s 2005 TSI reconstruction so is overestimated a bit. In any case, the solar forcing is deemed insignificant. According to their analysis, solar forcing contributed negligible long-term warming in the past 25 years and 10% of the warming in the past 100 years, not 69% as claimed by Scafetta and West [2008].
The anthropogenic forcing is the net effect of eight different components, including greenhouse gases, land use, snow albedo changes, and tropospheric aerosols.
I know the two authors. They are reputable scientists. No hanky-panky here.
Interesting.
There are two official sunspot numbers in common use. The first, the daily “Boulder Sunspot Number,” is computed by the NOAA Space Environment Center using a formula devised by Rudolph Wolf in 1848: R=k (10g+s), where R is the sunspot number; g is the number of sunspot groups on the solar disk; s is the total number of individual spots in all the groups; and k is a variable scaling factor (usually <1) that accounts for observing conditions and the type of telescope (binoculars, space telescopes, etc.). Scientists combine data from lots of observatories — each with its own k factor — to arrive at a daily value.
Perhaps someone can explain to me how, by using this formula a sunspeck the size of the recent (single) speck could have been seen and counted 200 years ago, we are not talking about groups just one speck.
Sunspots observations in the seventeenth century, the most active observers being the German Johannes Hevelius (1611-1687) and the French Jesuit Jean Picard (1620-1682). Very few sunspots were observed from about 1645 to 1715, and when they were their presence was noted as a noteworthy event by active astronomers. At that time, a systematic solar observing program was underway under the direction of Jean Dominique Cassini (1625-1712) at the newly founded Observatoire de Paris, with first Picard and later Philippe La Hire carrying out the bulk of the observations. Historical reconstructions of sunspot numbers indicate that the dearth of sunspots is real, rather than the consequence of a lack of diligent observers. A simultaneous decrease in auroral counts further suggest that solar activity was greatly reduced during this time period.
This article also gives a Reproduction of one of Galileo’s sunspot drawings.
http://www.hao.ucar.edu/Public/education/Timeline.C.html#1645
Robert Wood wrote…
Robert Wood (17:01:54) :
a step change in solar output would take at least 60 years to change then temperature of the oceans; remember the Oceans are an enormous thermal mass.
So, to argue about decadal changes is not very useful. We must be using at 60 smoothing year filters.
Lief responded…
Not only a filter, but also a lag of the order of 60 years, but the correlations claimed are without such lags. And there is also no lag in the claim that the last 10 years of cooling is due to the recent decline is solar activity. Just more examples of why the claims are not credible.
I submitted theis earlier question, probably a dumb one which no one responded to.
It appears that Leif reasonably questions the ability of the very small change in output during solar cycles to significantly affect climate . I have heard it postulated that LWR does not penetrate, and is therefore not absorbed by the ocean. If the SWR of increased solar activtity does penetrate the ocean surface is it not possible then that this small amount of increased energy is absorbed into the oceans and thus accumalates over the years of increased activity? Could not this along with the yet unproved theory of cosmic ray induced cloud formation be a signficant part of the amplifying affect of solar cycles?
And now another, I hope cogent question. If these two responses were valid
would not they have very different lag responses, the one (cloud cover) being almost instant, the other being very long and slow?
I think you may have this whole damn thing figured out. Perhaps you should factor in population zodiac sign data? —– 😉 , 😉
Just saw where Mike Bryant got a little hammered for being too silly. Not speaking for Mike, but only myself, sometime the best I can do to participate is, “silly.”
Anyway, please moderate this post and my “silly” post out. Will not happen again.
garron (04:24:49) :
“The correlation coefficient between the two time series is 0.92 [1.00 means perfect correlation]. Causation?”
I think you may have this whole damn thing figured out. Perhaps you should factor in population zodiac sign data? —– 😉 , 😉
yeah, adding that may drive the correlation coefficient past 1.00.
“I know the two authors. They are reputable scientists. No hanky-panky here.”
This has no persuasive import, as you are well aware.
Less than 40% of the sun’s incident energy reaches the surface. Of this fraction, re-radiated into the atmosphere, none returns. Why shill such ‘work’?
Gary Gulrud (07:17:29) :
“I know the two authors. They are reputable scientists. No hanky-panky here.”
This has no persuasive import, as you are well aware.
I just stated that as a fact. Lean and Rind are tops. Their work is rock solid. If you care to look, you’ll see that they are talking about multivariate strong correlations. You may argue [talk to Alec], like me, that strong correlations do not imply causation, so you can still maintain your views and not be persuaded.
‘So as long as they stay the same, it doesn’t matter when the minimum is. The reason that the polar fields stay the same is that there are no new cycle [24] regions eating away at them, but this can go on ‘forever’, as far as I’m concerned.’
I see from your graphs that the crossover period for when the first new cycle spots appear and when they actually start eating away at the last cycle is highly variable.
Is there a list for the length of these crossovers previous to SC21/SC22?