Click for large image
This is the biggest Cycle 24 spot since the first one was seen on January 4th, 2008. This spot looks to have some staying power other than the “specks” we’ve seen winking on and off lately. No squinting to see this one, or wondering if it’s a dead pixel in the SOHO CCD imager or not.
The corresponding magnetogram image, seen here, is also quite pronounced. The polarity is correct, with the white “North” at the top. This spot grew quickly as it came around the rim into visibility. Watch this animation below:
At the same time, to the right of the image, at lower latitude, a new cycle 23 sunspot seems to be emerging, note it has a reveresed polarity from the larger SC24 spot. Solar cycle 23 just won’t give up it seems.
The magentic field, as shown by the Average Planetary index (Ap) remained low in September, see here.
‘80% [or some number like that] of what happens is random, so ‘made up’ on the go.’ –Leif Svalgaard
May I be permitted a philosophical reflection? I read, many years ago, James Gleick’s book on chaos theory, and found the notion of a cosmos in which unpredictability and indeterminacy play a significant role exhilirating and liberating. Classical materialism, based on the notion that every catenation of events is 100% pre-programmed, precludes spontaneity and freedom. Modern physics, it seems to me, validates these notions on many levels.
A few months ago I got to talking at the train station with an Indian mathematician (stereotypes sometimes are validated) whose specialization, as he told me, was ‘stochastic series and partial differential equations.’ Way beyond my ken, to be sure, but I still found it reassuring to know that creativity and novelty (in A.N. Whitehead’s sense) can be mathematically described.
I would assume that stochastic series and partial differential equations are important in describing the dynamics both of the sun and heliosphere, and of the earth’s atmosphere.
It’s a great solar system; I wouldn’t live anywhere else!
‘Region 11005 decayed slowly and quietly.’–Solar Terrestrial Activity Report
Requiescat in pace.
Glenn (23:42:24) :
Perhaps you two are exploring different issues. Glenn is impatiently interested in knowing the strength of SC24, and Leif is more interested in learning the physics so that he can forecast the strength of future cycles.
Normal scientific method is to develop a plausible hypothesis describing that physics, then testing it to see its predictive capacity. Some past data is usually “used up” in developing the hypothesis, but remaining data, past and future, can be used to test it.
Leif is driven to understand the physics, but you can skip some of that step if you don’t mind groping in the dark or don’t trust existing models. The Klotzbach/Gray hurricane forecasts are done that way. “Inpsired” by the disappointing forecast performance over the last couple of years, they came up with new schemes and tested it against past hurricane data before using it for for their spring forecast. http://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/forecasts/
And Leif, didn’t you tell us not long ago that when a scientist states something with absolute certainty, they’re usually wrong… 😉
Leif Svalgaard (04:19:49) :
Since the decay of one cycle is a fairly random process, we don’t think we can ever predict more than one cycle ahead as we need to observe the [unpredictable] polar fields at the start of the next cycle. This is in contrast to the planetary people who can predict the cycle millions of years in advance with impunity. So, we are definitely inferior to those guys
So, according to you, the NASA predictions for SC25 are similarly unfounded?
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/10may_longrange.htm
[…] the sun puts out a new and significant cycle 24 spot, the real news is just how quiet the suns magnetic field has been in the past couple of years, […]
Ric Werme (05:55:13) :
Perhaps you two are exploring different issues. Glenn is impatiently interested in knowing the strength of SC24, and Leif is more interested in learning the physics so that he can forecast the strength of future cycles.
As long as Glenn can prove me wrong in any way, he does seem to interested in anything else 🙂
Jeff Alberts (08:35:23) :
And Leif, didn’t you tell us not long ago that when a scientist states something with absolute certainty, they’re usually wrong… 😉
Especially an elderly, distinguished scientist. But, please, learn how to interpret scientific jargon [Joe Public often gets this wrong]. When a scientist says ‘can’ or ‘cannot’ or some other definite statement, he really means ‘as far as the evidence as interpreted by my theory with the usual caveats and uncertainties may suggest or indicate under the standard assumptions as they may be pertinent to the interpretation at this point in time’, but this is so cumbersome to append to every single statement that it, obviously, is left unsaid and simply understood.
Carsten Arnholm, Norway (09:11:07) :
So, according to you, the NASA predictions for SC25 are similarly unfounded?
No, my model can only do one cycle ahead. NASA/NOAA claim that they can do two cycles ahead, but clearly, if they are wrong on the first of these, the second one is worthless. Dikpati et al. have repeatedly said they would come with a prediction for SC25, but it has never materialized. Hathaway predicted a large SC24 [his prediction is steadily shrinking …] and a small SC25. So, if NASA etc’s prediction for SC24 turns out to be correct, there is a chance that SC25 will also be correct.
“There is one other aspect of burning massive amounts of fossil fuels that I have never heard anyone comment on: The release of heat.”
I saw such a couple years back, Idso comes to mind (probably spuriously), but I’d bet I saw it rooting around Warwick Hughes, or another SH site, like NZClimateScience.
“if there is a real correlation between solar minimums and global cooling…”
Dansgaard-Oeschger event? Anyone? Sadlov?
Ric Werme (05:55:13) :
Normal scientific method is to develop a plausible hypothesis describing that physics, then testing it to see its predictive capacity.
In our 1978 paper we posited that if Babcock’s solar cycle ‘model’ was correct then the polar fields should be a good predictor of the next cycle. Since there were no good measurements of the polar fields back then [our own data had not yet been digested] we had to use several proxies for the polar fields. The proxies all pointed to a strong cycle 21 [or at least stronger than cycle 20], so our prediction was for a rather strong cycle. This was going against the prevailing wisdom at the time that was expecting a small cycle because that would fit with the expected coming minimum of the ~80 year Gleisberg cycle. So, in that sense we were successful. Once we got real polar field data it became clear that the use of the actual polar fields [obviously] was better than the proxies and the relation has proven true for the several cycles since then. Because the cycles were not very different, the ‘successful’ predictions were not a very strong test. For the coming cycle 24, the polar fields are much smaller than for the previous several cycles and this thus provides a setup for a strong test. We have been criticized for peddling a correlation based on two or three data points only, but that is a mis-characterization of our approach, which is not one of correlation, but of calibration. We posit that it must be like this, use the observations to fix the size of the cycle, and then make a prediction that will serve as a validation or as a refutation of the assumption, as the case may turn out to be.
“is to develop a plausible hypothesis ” That way we get to rule out inconvenient theories as “implausible” based on our own prejudices right off the bat. Remember when continental drift was implausible? Was relativity “plausible”? I don’t think so at the time to the vast majority of physicists. Einstein didn’t think Quantum Mechanics was plausible, yet somehow it has proven to be perhaps the most spectacularly successful predictive theory of all time, if you go by the number of significant digits to which its predictions have been verified.
Sometimes you have to go where the numbers or other evidence take you, whether it seems “plausible” or not. Time sorts out what is plausible.
Leif, Kim – if your still around
Regarding 15:25:02:
“I know what I do, and my data is on my website for anybody to repeat the integration. I don’t know what they do. What are they doing differently :-)”
I would be happy to send both of you my Excel worksheet with the data and charts on it. I would even clean it up for you and describe what I am doing with ImageJ.
I would appreciate knowing what I am doing wrong. Then you could toss it in the trash.
Steve Hempell aka Hemst 101 (my old login at work). :]
Steve Hempell (14:10:33) :
I would be happy to send both of you my Excel worksheet with the data and charts on it
please do: leif@leif.org
Thanks, Steve, but I’m a poseur and wouldn’t know which end of the spreadsheet was up, but I am really curious why you and Pete get ‘telling’ graphs and Leif doesn’t. Maybe Leif can do something with your work?
If it’s TSI that runs the climate, then your integrating is valid. If it isn’t, it’s irrelevant. Truly, I would have expected Leif to be just a little more curious about why your results and Pete’s differ from his. I note that he did not point out to Pete his error last year.
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moptop (14:08:14) :
Sometimes you have to go where the numbers or other evidence take you, whether it seems “plausible” or not. Time sorts out what is plausible.
The cases you refer to [you could have included Newtonian Gravity, Evolution, Dark Energy, etc] were accepted because of their great explanatory and predictive power, because they were a synthesis of a great amount of observations – they are in a sense just abbreviations for the corpus of observations. This does not apply to most ‘implausible’ hypotheses, e.g. that climate change is wrought by little green men from Mars running a physics experiment, that Uranus/Neptune control solar activity, that the mind can bend spoons, etc. Just because Quantum Mechanics doesn’t make sense, does not mean that any other idea that doesn’t make sense is automatically elevated to the same status, power, and demand for attention.
moptop
While we are on the topic – lessons of science history – there is a fascinating book called “The Demon under the Microscope”. It is the story of the discovery of Sulfa Drugs.
The Germans at Bayer were convinced that a sulfonimide molecule had to be attached to an Azo ring at a certain position to work. They had spent years, lots of money and plenty of brainpower playing with the Azo + sulfa molecule and finally got it to work. (When you took the drug you turned red or purple or some kind of colour – but it saved your life)
The French wanted in on this and were experimenting with the drug using mice trying to make it better. One time they had 5 extra mice so they thought, what the hay, lets just give them the sulfonimide – after infecting them with strep – all by itself (cheap compound). You guessed it, it worked!!
The Germans didn’t believe it and kept spending money and resources on azo compounds for years(they were from a dye background) and beside Bayer had lots of money invested.
Sound familiar.
The book is a fascinating read on many levels, and gives you an appreciation of the danger and dread of infectious diseases our grandparents lived with. Something we don’t give hardly a second thought to now.
Leif
Re your post in response to Pamela Gray (third from the top here) which is most interesting, in terms of working out whether cycle minimum is here or not, and your paper at :http://www.leif.org/research/Asymmetric%20Rosenberg-Coleman%20Effect.pdf
I know you regard the notion that the sun affects the distribution of the Earths atmosphere on the dayside as insupportable. Consider then the exact conjunction of the recently observed (if not always present to the same intensity ) El Nino in the rising phase of the solar cycle with the peak frequency of BZ intensity as shown in your Morlet wavelet map analysis in Fig 1 of that paper. I would think that seven out of seven is a pretty good score. You could go into the long term climate prediction business on the bases of this observation.
Your paper argues that a more stable, plane heliospheric current sheet is present only in the rising phase of the solar cycle producing an annual variation in geomagnetic activity as the Earth is influenced in turn by the activity of the suns southern hemisphere and then the suns northern hemisphere. It would seem that the strength of the El Nino could be related to the strength of the solar activity in one hemisphere of the sun versus the other, depending upon which produced the greater BZ intensity.
Some queries: Is the southward component of the solar wind different according to hemispheric origin? Is one hemisphere consistently more active than the other and over what time scales? Is it possible to say from that observation whether peak impact is to be expected in January or July?
Please don’t give up on me yet.
Erl (16:11:44) I believe you have a greater understanding of the heat engine that runs the earth climate than anyone else on Earth. I wonder if Harry van Loon might not be able to help you.
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kim (14:48:18) :
I note that he did not point out to Pete his error last year.
I had not made my integration back then. Furthermore, I don’t think it serves any purpose anyway [preconceived notion here] so did not bother.
Erl Happ (16:11:44) :
Please don’t give up on me yet.
I have. But shall, of course, answer questions and provide whatever explanations I can, as for anybody else.
I know you regard the notion that the sun affects the distribution of the Earths atmosphere on the dayside as insupportable.
No, not at all. Just your specific mechanism(s).
Consider then the exact conjunction of the recently observed (if not always present to the same intensity ) El Nino in the rising phase of the solar cycle with the peak frequency of BZ intensity as shown in your Morlet wavelet map analysis in Fig 1 of that paper.
That figure shows the SIGN of the polarity [away and towards the Sun] of the IMF, not its strength, nor BZ. The polarity is a large-scale feature of the IMF that stays the same for many days. The sign of BZ changes from hour to hour. In very rare cases does it stay of the same sign for many hours. When that happens and its direction is South, we get a great geomagnetic storm [especially if the solar wind speed is also high], but this is comparatively rare [at most a few times per month at solar max].
I would think that seven out of seven is a pretty good score.
It is not conceivable that the polarity of the IMF has any effect, per se [apart from some subtle geomagnetic effect, hardly measurable – a long story can be spun on this, but that is for another post].
You could go into the long term climate prediction business on the bases of this observation.
There is a sucker born every day. I know people who give stock market advice on basis of this, and treatment schedules for inmates of lunatic asylums, you name it.
Your paper argues that a more stable, plane heliospheric current sheet is present only in the rising phase of the solar cycle producing an annual variation in geomagnetic activity as the Earth is influenced in turn by the activity of the suns southern hemisphere and then the suns northern hemisphere.
No quite the opposite as far as activity is concerned. In section [20] we say “this explanation is not enough to account [for] the variability in geomagnetic activity”.
Is the southward component of the solar wind different according to hemispheric origin?
In general not. There are some exceptions [see later], but Bz is generally a purely local effect generated by turbulence and waves
Is one hemisphere consistently more active than the other and over what time scales?
Depends on the timescale up to years. There can be some asymmetry for a time, see e.g. http://sidc.oma.be/html/wnosuf.html but none in the long run.
A CME gives rise to a magnetic cloud or tongue which sometimes retains its Bz structure all the way from the Sun. You will observe that Bz first goes, say, North for a few hours, then slowly swings South for the next several hours. Such occurrences are relatively rare.
Is it possible to say from that observation whether peak impact is to be expected in January or July?
There are three competing effects: the closer to the Sun [January 4], the stronger the IMF [and thus also Bz], and the solar wind speed is largest on September 7 and March 7 [because it generally increases with distance from the current sheet. These two effects are very small and hard to tease out of the data [requiring averaging over decades of data – c.f. section [62] and Figure A7 of http://www.leif.org/research/2007JA012437.pdf ] The third effect has to do with the seasonal and diurnal tilt of the Earth’s magnetic field into the solar wind, resulting in the solar wind ‘seeing’ a somewhat weaker geomagnetic field on March 23 and September 23 with resulting higher geomagnetic activity [see sections [17-18] and Figure 4 of the paper cited, or the discussion in http://www.leif.org/research/The%20semiannual%20variation%20of%20great%20geomagnetic%20storms.pdf ]. The latter effect is a modulation of existing activity, so does not ‘generate’ new activity. The modulation can amount to several tens of percents.
All these effects are subtle and complicated, but are unlikely to be primary drivers, simply because they are so subtle.
anna v (03:36:39) wrote: “There should be bets, like Pooh Sticks.”
Christopher and his crew are a universal link between disparate individuals and nations, huh, anna v… kinda “Hi, friend!”.
Leif Svalgaard (14:05:16) wrote: “As the real world is so immensely complex, people are often drawn [like moths to a flame] towards such simple and comforting ideas, no matter what physical merit they may have or lack.”
Nice philosophic line, Leif, worth contemplating some.
Does anyone know why the solar rotation rate at a particular lattitude changes over time? Are there publically available data sets for solar rotation? I just found a little bit. Thanks.
Alphajuno (20:44:04) :
Does anyone know why the solar rotation rate at a particular lattitude changes over time?
We recently looked into some of that:
http://www.leif.org/research/ast10867.pdf
The data is noisy and not very convincing.
Leif Svalgaard (21:01:36) :
The data is noisy and not very convincing.
Agree, bit hard to determine anything from that report. Do we measure the rotation speed of the Sun or parts of and if so how is the performance right now?
Leif Svalgaard (18:25:33) :
Thanks for your answer which I will study very carefully after recovering from 8 hours straight driving a tractor.
“I know you regard the notion that the sun affects the distribution of the Earths atmosphere on the dayside as insupportable.
No, not at all. Just your specific mechanism(s).”
This intrigues me. By what mechanism can the sun affect the Earths atmosphere in terms of density and distribution?
By the way, this is the data that I forgot to show in the last post
:http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/SOIRCeffect_Page_1.jpg
The SOI (Southern Oscillation Index) is sign reversed so that when it goes up it represents warming. In its normal presentation a rising index represents a La Nina.
By the way, the current weak La Nina appears to be strengthening. Paradoxically, the only anomalously warm areas in the oceans appear to be those parts that routinely have heavy cloud cover. In mid latitudes these are areas where tropical moisture streams away from the equator so the warming appears to be via absorption of heat from the atmosphere.
kim (17:31:50) :
Thanks for your confidence in me. I have a great admiration for Harry’s work. I corresponded with Harry briefly and recently invested in his book ‘The Stratosphere’. Harry has long been interested in the solar connection. In his correspondence he remarked that solar maximum is frequently marked by a La Nina, a point brought out in his most recent articles.
The big El Ninos that have marked the rising phase of the cycle in recent times add a lot of moisture to the atmosphere, particularly that in 1998. A precipitation response can be self reinforcing in that it produces surface cooling, atmospheric cooling, condensation, more cloud, keeps out the solar radiation hence more precipitation. La Nina represents the Earth taking over the reins for a while after a surfeit of solar influence. So, its not surprising that a big El Nino in the rising phase can produce a strong La Nina at solar maximum. This comprehensively masks any changes due to small changes in irradiance. It also makes complete nonsense of any expectation that the Earth should be warmer at solar maximum, even though Camp and Tung (if my memory is correct) happened to find that it was marginally warmer. If La Nina marks the minimum and also the maximum where are we?
Tropical warming and cooling events are what we observe in terms of temperature change. The first requirement of any climate theory is to explain what we observe.