Animation courtesy Michael Ronayne. Click for larger, slower speed animation
NASA’s David Hathaway just recently updated his solar cycle prediction and has pushed cycle 24 into the future a little more once again. Though to read his latest update on 10/03/08 at his prediction page here, you wouldn’t know it, because the page is mostly tech speak and reviews of semi relevant papers.
However, there is one graphic, the familar one above, that has been updated and tells the story best. Michael Ronayne was kind enough to provide an animation (above) that shows the march of time as far as solar cycle 24 predictions go. With the latest update (static image here) the startup of solar cycle 24 has been pushed into 2009.
This isn’t the first time NASA has moved the goalpost. Back in March I did a story on NASA moving the goal post then, and since then they’ve moved the cycle ahead twice, once in April and again now in October.
NASA isn’t the only one having to update predictions, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) has also had to make several adjustments to their graphic:
Animation courtesy Michael Ronayne. Click for larger animation
And there is more change in the current thinking on sunspots. As Michael Ronayne writes:
After ignoring sunspots for two and a half years the New York Times finally ran a story and BLOG posting on the current state of the Sun.
Sunspots Are Fewest Since 1954, but Significance Is Unclear
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/science/space/03sun.html
Climate and the Spotless Sun
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/climate-and-the-spotless-sun/
Details of the recent NASA reports on Ulysses and the Spotless Sun were minimal and the Times failed to mention NASA’s report that the Sun was dimming. The Times reporter speculated on possible connections between solar activity and Earth climate but such speculation was of concern to some Times readers who made their views know in the Dot Earth BLOG. Perhaps the Times should avoid controversial phrases such as “Little Ice Age” in the future. I decided to make a post on the Dot Earth BLOG about some of the graphic records I have been collecting of past SWPC and NASA sunspots predictions. Apparently my input was not fit to print because the moderator did not allow it to be posted to Dot Earth. Attached is the text of my submission to the New York Times. I thought the posting was quite balanced and am not sure what warranted it being rejected.
As you review the SWPC and NASA predictions, note that the outer envelope for the onset of Solar Cycle 24 for the SWPC Low Prediction (http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/SC24/ssn_predict.gif) is January 2009, while the NASA prediction has been moved out to July 2009. Watch the two animations carefully and note where the changes were made in the NASA predictions.
I am writing a segment on Sunspot Predictions which will be posted in Wikipedia, at the following URL, when it is done:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunspot
It will be interesting to see when solar minimum actually occurs. I suspect that we will be in for a long wait. I will keep the above animations current as SWPC and NASA post their monthly updates.
Lots of scrambling going on to get in tune with the sun these days.
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Bobby Lane, they won’t wait that long. The predictions come at least quarterly now.
Though I think it’s better to call these forecasts SWAGs: Sophisticated Wild A** Guesses.
Leif,
“The Sun warms the Earth. Most of that heat [300 times as much as in the atmosphere] goes into the oceans which are the heat store of the climate system. Small changes in the circulations of the oceans might have a large climate effect. There are ocean-related weather/climate effects called El Ninos, for example. Just an example of how it is not an either TSI or CO2 question. There are many factors involved, even volcanoes from time to time. [they tend to cool the Earth].”
I consider this progress.
Would you care to speculate as to whether El Nino’s are related to cloud cover which is in turn related to temperature in that part of the troposphere where ice clouds form?
How is it that the outgoing long wave radiation as measured by satellites has increased over the period of record and could declining cloud cover be responsible?
Stephen Wilde (15:47:31) :
You have spoken about an average solar cycle variation in TSI from peak to trough of each cycle of 1 W/m2. You have also said that the average change in TSI since the Maunder Minimum to the Modern Maximum was 1 W/m2.
No, half a Watt/m2/ And if Livingston & Penn are correct, no difference. See my post on that at New Solar cycle …
Here it is again:
Let me run this thought by you:
TSI has several components. The one that varies with the solar cycle is actually the sum of two components: facular brightening and sunspot darkening. The facular brightening is caused by the broad magnetic fields surrounding the compact, and dark, spots. The brightening is about twice the darkening by spots, say +2 W/m2 with a darkening of -1 W/m2 for a total of +1 W/m2. Assume that Livingston and Penn are correct that the sunspot contrast is decreasing, possibly to the point of making the spots invisible, then the -1 W/m2 darkening would disappear. We know from cosmic rays that the magnetic field of the solar activity did not go away during the Maunder Minimum, so the facular brightening would still be there, maybe a bit weaker [the magnetic field field would be about half according to L&P], say half of the +2 w/m2, that is +1 W/m2 so TSI even during the Maunder Minimum would still show the familiar 1 W/m2 solar cycle variation, but now throughout the 400 year span. What would that do to your argument?
Fantastic graphics.
Leif-
Thanks for your TSI explanation. And I appreciate the time taken for you to write it.
Mark
Hey! They found their hockey stick:D
“Leif Svalgaard (21:33:42) :
Stephen Wilde (15:47:31) :
You have spoken about an average solar cycle variation in TSI from peak to trough of each cycle of 1 W/m2. You have also said that the average change in TSI since the Maunder Minimum to the Modern Maximum was 1 W/m2.
No, half a Watt/m2/ And if Livingston & Penn are correct, no difference. See my post on that at New Solar cycle …
Here it is again:
Let me run this thought by you:
TSI has several components. The one that varies with the solar cycle is actually the sum of two components: facular brightening and sunspot darkening. The facular brightening is caused by the broad magnetic fields surrounding the compact, and dark, spots. The brightening is about twice the darkening by spots, say +2 W/m2 with a darkening of -1 W/m2 for a total of +1 W/m2. Assume that Livingston and Penn are correct that the sunspot contrast is decreasing, possibly to the point of making the spots invisible, then the -1 W/m2 darkening would disappear. We know from cosmic rays that the magnetic field of the solar activity did not go away during the Maunder Minimum, so the facular brightening would still be there, maybe a bit weaker [the magnetic field field would be about half according to L&P], say half of the +2 w/m2, that is +1 W/m2 so TSI even during the Maunder Minimum would still show the familiar 1 W/m2 solar cycle variation, but now throughout the 400 year span. What would that do to your argument?”
If true, it wouldn’t help and if it were demonstrably true with no real world phenomena to cast doubt on it than I’d accept it until new evidence contradicted it.
However it’s all rather speculative based on incomplete knowledge so I remain unconvinced and we do have inconvenient real world phenomena to complicate the position.
Just looking at the difference on Leif 2007 between the periods 1650 to 1700 and 1950 to 2000 puts huge reservations in my mind.
For readers who don’t want to search for it here it is again:
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-LEIF.pdf
I’d like to hear from others as to whether or not they see a basic similarity in the overall shape of all the lines displayed. To my mind the similarities outweigh the differences and I cannot understand you arguing to the contrary.
You accept that TSI pre satellite is unreliable and speculative but you feel confident enough to limit past variation to a very small figure.
You accept the oceans might well have a highly significant role but do not accept my suggestion that we need to research any link between recently discovered oscillations, solar variation and the timing of global temperature changes.
There is much in your position that I find illogical.
[…] more here: Comment on NASA moves the goalposts on Solar Cycle 24 again by Mark Tags: Climate Change, education, local-issues, picture, resources, science, technology, weather […]
There is indeed much phenomena on the ground this year. Marked changes in plant and small animal behavior can be striking for those who are paying attention and observing, especially those involved in agriculture on a daily basis. The masses don’t notice it as much, being sourrounded by an artificial environment for the most part.
http://www.nwra-az.com/spawx/ssne-cycle23.html
These folks have also changed their graph, they included that which had been chopped off by activity far below expected minimum in their previous graphs.
http://www.ips.gov.au/Solar/1/6
Another chopped off graph, perhaps the predicitons of these folks likewise suffers from software that is truncating the data that lies unexpectedly below minimum.
Could be that the reason Hathaway’s model keeps failing him is that it isn’t prepared to accept data points or outcomes below that which we are accustomed to. The bottom keeps dropping out. That will mess up your projection curves.
[…] See original here: Comment on NASA moves the goalposts on Solar Cycle 24 again by … […]
Robert Bateman (04:20:09) :
The bottom of that page says:
Description of Prediction Technique
“The prediction is based on the average of the last 8 solar cycles (Cycles 15 to 23). IPS will adjust this average cycle as the new cycle unfolds. To do this IPS has developed software for manipulating this predicted cycle. The difficulty is ensuring that adjustments are not made for short term variation, only for longer term cycle variation.”
I would argue this technique doesn’t apply when the Sun is entering a period unlike cycles 15-23. 🙂
One brownie point for consistency, though.
It occurred to me that a way to measure total solar influence, as opposed to the TSI radiation measurements, would be to have a large mass of similar composition to the earth, but without the complications of atmosphere and oceans, in earth orbit. Then we could measure the temperature variations in our large earthlike mass during changes in the sun. The moon comes close to being such a test mass, but when I went looking on the web for lunar surface temperature records, I came up empty. Has anyone seen anything on this?
Stephen Wilde (00:47:37) :
I’d like to hear from others as to whether or not they see a basic similarity in the overall shape of all the lines displayed.
There are two features of the graphs that may be conflated. One is the obvious 11-year variation which is present in all of them. The other [and that is the important one] is the long-term trends. Imagine you filter out [remove] the 11-year variation. Then you are left with a horizontal straight line [no variation at all] for Leif2007 and with a curve that shows a significant climb from the LIA until today for Lean2000. This is the salient and all-important difference, and where the curves show their dissimilarity.
You accept that TSI pre satellite is unreliable and speculative but you feel confident enough to limit past variation to a very small figure.
I have many times in the past presented evidence for very limited variation of TSI and shall repeat some of that here:
Line 1:
The Total solar Irradiance (TSI) has several sources. The first and most important is simply the temperature in the photosphere. The hotter the sun, the higher the TSI. Some spectral lines are VERY sensitive to even minute changes in temperature. Livingston et al. has very carefully measured the line depth of such temperature-sensitive lines over more than 30 years spanning three solar cycles [Sun-as-a-Star Spectrum Variations 1974-2006, W. Livingston, L. Wallace, O. R. White, M. S. Giampapa, The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 657, Issue 2, pp. 1137-1149, 2007, DOI; 10.1086/511127]. They report [and I apologize for the somewhat technical turn my argument is taking, but if you really want to know, there is no avoiding this], “that both Ca II K and C I 5380A intensities are constant, indicating that the basal quiet atmosphere is unaffected by cycle magnetism within our observational error. A lower limit to the Ca II K central intensity atmosphere is 0.040. This possibly represents conditions as they were during the Maunder Minimum [their words, remember]. Within our capability to measure it using the C I 5380A line the global (Full Disk) and basal (Center Disk) photospheric temperature is constant over the activity cycles 21, 22, and 23″. I have known Bill Livingston [and White] for over 35 years and he is a very careful and competent observer.
Line 2:
Since the 1960 we have known that the sun’s surface oscillates up and down [with typical periods of ~5 minutes]. These oscillations are waves very much like seismic waves in the Earth [caused by earthquakes] and just as earthquake seismic waves can be used to probe the interior of the Earth, they can be used to probe the solar interior. There are millions of such solar waves at any given time and there are different kinds (called ‘modes’) of waves. The solar p-modes are acoustic [sound waves] normal modes. You one can imagine a frequency increase with an increasing magnetic field, due to the increase in magnetic pressure raising the local speed of sound near the surface where it is cooler and where the p-modes spend most of their time. Of course one can also imagine higher frequencies may result from an induced shrinking of the sound cavity and/or an isobaric warming of the cavity. Another kind is the solar f-modes that are the eigenmodes of the sun having no radial null points [i.e. asymptotically surface waves; again I apologize for the technical mumbo-jumbo]. From the solar cycle variations of p- and f-modes [and we have now enough data from the SOHO spacecraft to make such a study] we now have an internally consistent picture of the origin of these frequency changes that implies a sun that is coolest at activity maximum when it is most irradiant. Now, how can that be? How can a cooler [overall, including the cooler sunspots, for instance, as the temperature of the non-magnetic areas of the sun didn’t change {see line 1 above}] sun radiate more? It can do that, if it is bigger! The change in the radius of the Sun from minimum to maximum is about 1 km. Goode and Dziembowski (Sunshine, Earthshine and Climate Change I. Origin of, and Limits on Solar Variability, by Goode, Philip R. & Dziembowski, W. A., Journal of the Korean Astronomical Society, vol. 36, S1, pp. S75-S81, 2003) used the helioseismic data to determine the shape changes in the Sun with rising activity. They calculated the so-called shape asymmetries from the seismic data and found each coefficient was essentially zero at activity minimum and rose in precise spatial correlation with rising surface activity, as measured using Ca II K data from Big Bear Solar Observatory. From this one can conclude that there is a rising corrugation of the solar surface due to rising activity, implying a sun, whose increased irradiance is totally due to activity induced corrugation. This interpretation has been recently observationally verified by Berger et al. (Berger, T.E., van der Voort, L., Rouppe, Loefdahl, M., Contrast analysis of Solar faculae and magnetic bright points. Astrophysical Journal, vol. 661, p.1272, 2007) using the new Swedish Solar Telescope. They have directly observed these corrugations. Goode & Dziembowski conclude that the Sun cannot have been any dimmer, on the time steps of solar evolution, than it is now at activity minimum.
Line 3:
Foukal et al. (Foukal, P., North, G., Wigley, T., A stellar view on solar variations and climate. Science, vol. 306, p. 68, 2004) point out the Sun’s web-like chromospheric magnetic network (an easily visible solar structure seen through a Ca II K filter) would have looked very different a century ago, if there had been a significant change in the magnetic field of the sun supposedly increasing TSI. However, there is a century of Mt. Wilson Solar Observatory Ca II K data which reveal that the early 20th century network is indistinguishable from that of today.
So, to summarize these:
1. The base TSI is constant in the absence of magnetic fields
2. Increased TSI is totally due to activity induced corrugations
3. Early 20th century network is indistinguishable from that of today
The net result is that if you take away solar activity, there is no background rise of TSI over time. This is the central point. On Lean2000’s plot the rise in the background is much bigger than the individual cycle variations and it is this rise that people see as correlated with temperature [the ‘obvious’ correlation]. Take away the rise and the correlation disappears. And that is where the graphs are different: no rise vs. a rise that is associated with a rise in temps.
There is much in your position that I find illogical.
[Sigh] I do not operate from a ‘position’ that must be defended, but rather present the solar evidence so that you and others can form your own opinion on what is going on. I do not object to your opinions only to the use of incorrect data whenever I see that.
If true, it wouldn’t help and if it were demonstrably true with no real world phenomena to cast doubt on it than I’d accept it until new evidence contradicted it.
In trying to parse and decipher your statement it sounds like you would use the LIA [the real world phenomenon?] as an argument against the possibility that Livingston and Penn might be correct. This is this kind of circular reasoning that I object to. It is akin to the argument that TSI must have been low during MM because of the LIA and therefore we build that in to our TSI-reconstruction to support the ‘obvious’ correlation with temps.
I have been struggling to get to the actual influence of TSI at the surface of earth. It seems that knowing there is a 90W/m2 difference from our orbit and comparing the temperatures at the equator +/-23deg Latt. for Dec-Feb and Jun-Aug should give a temperature delta per watt ratio. This would eliminate land/sea differences of the hemispheres. I can’t find the data for that Latt at the UAH site, but I have seen graphs labeled uah_tropic_lt posted on this site. Anyone know where that data is? TIA
George Ismael,
That is a great idea. Now where is the data?
Yesterday (6-Oct-2008) I posted this:
The Space Weather Prediction Center has updated its plot of the Geomagnetic Planetary Index (Ap) for September – still very low. See “ISES Solar Cycle Ap Progression” chart at the bottom of this web page:
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/
Today (7-Oct-2008) when I go to that link, the September data point has been removed. I wish I had taken a screen capture of it for reference. As I recall, it was slightly higher in value than the August point, but lower than the July point. I wonder what the new graphic will show when SWPC updates it again.
Erl Happ (21:08:43) :
Would you care to speculate as to whether El Nino’s are related to cloud cover which is in turn related to temperature in that part of the troposphere where ice clouds form?
I don’t know what you mean by ‘related’. El Nino is the result of wind-driven Kelvin waves.
How is it that the outgoing long wave radiation as measured by satellites has increased over the period of record and could declining cloud cover be responsible?
It’s called ‘Global Warming’. An warmer world emits more long wave radiation.
George Ismael (05:51:26) :
Then we could measure the temperature variations in our large earthlike mass during changes in the sun. The moon comes close to being such a test mass, but when I went looking on the web for lunar surface temperature records
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/news/2008ScienceMeeting/posters/SROCE_Wen.pdf
Stephen Wilde (00:47:37) :
The issue of TSI ‘background’ is also addressed here
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/news/2008ScienceMeeting/posters/SROCE_Wen.pdf
Note the red non-background TSI curve. [looks just like Leif2007]
George
Good idea. athttp://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/cosmic_kids/AskKids/moontemp.shtml
The temperature on the moon varies from -387 Fahrenheit (-233 Celsius), at night, to 253 Fahrenheit (123 Celsius) during the day.
No flywheel (the ocean). No atmosphere to dampen the swings. Average temperature minus -110°C
Excuse me for being slow to the epiphany, but seems to me that the conveyor model worked fine for SC#19 when the magnetic field stayed strong (in Hathaway’s & Dikpati’s postdictive hindcasts? ;-).
Sunspot group/conveyor mechanics or not, perhaps the magnetic dynamo relationship between solar & terrestrial weather becomes more intuitive when we look at Janssens’ spotless days evolution ( where the current trend suggests current solar activity easing back to levels typical of at least SC 10.
I say “at least” because SC #10 is the beginning of Janssens’ datasets (1855 – just after the Dalton minimum & its contemporaneous terrestrial cool spell). If you are lurking Jan … I’m wondering what data exists that could give us a feel for the earlier solar cycles SC 1 – 9?
ref:
http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/Spotless/Spotless.html#Evolution
Leif Svalgaard (06:49:25) :
“An warmer world emits more long wave radiation.”
A little problem in logic here. If the world warms by increasing the residence time of the energy in its oceans/atmosphere OLR should fall as it warms then recover to its original level when the warming has stopped. Incoming energy as watts per square metre times surface area is a constant and sets an upper limit on the energy that can be irradiated by the Earth (ignoring energy emanating from below the crust).
Looking at the phenomena in another way, if the Earth is part absorber (which emits long wave) and part reflector (of some waves that are sent off to space without change in wave length, e.g. visible spectrum) then if that part which is reflector is diminished Outgoing Long Wave will increase because the total of radiation that is converted to the long wave form increases.
Re ENSO Kelvin waves represent oceanic/ atmospheric process. They tell us nothing about the cause of the process. The Kettle boils. Bubbles rise to the surface but the bubbles are not the cause of the boiling.
Leif:
Thanks for that insight into the implications of Livingston & Penn’s prediction. Would one surmise – in pure terms of TSI – then that low sunspot activity of negligible faculae then could “dim” the sun more than a wholly spotless disc? Is this possible?