While 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, and remained during September 2008. From the data provided by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) you can see just how little magnetic field activity there has been. I’ve graphed it below with the latest available data from October 6th, 2008:
click for a larger image
What I find most interesting about the Geomagnetic Average Planetary Index graph above is what happened around October 2005. Notice the sharp drop in the magnetic index and the continuance at low levels.
This looks much like a “step function” that I see on GISS surface temperature graphs when a station has been relocated to a cooler measurement environment. In the case of the sun, it appears this indicates that something abruptly “switched off” in the inner workings of the solar dynamo. Note that in the prior months, the magnetic index was ramping up a bit with more activity, then it simply dropped and stayed mostly flat.
Currently the Ap magnetic index continues at a low level, and while the “smoothed” data from SWPC is not made available for 2008, I’ve added it with a dashed blue line, and the trend appears to be going down.
However, it will be interesting to see if an uptick in the Ap index occurs, now that a significant SC24 spot has emerged. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait until early November for SWPC to update the data set.
Pamela Gray (14:08:49) :
The artist didn’t stray far from your drawing. Sometimes those artists can stylize something past the point of what was intended by the original depiction, that of trying to capture the essence of a phenomena.
That is why his image is so iconic and still being used because it captures things ‘just right’.
But back to chads and data cards. That has to be a picture of a data card.
What ‘that’? I don’t see the connection… Which figure number?
Leif Svalgaard (13:27:48) :
John-X (11:12:53) :
‘The latest Stanford Wilcox Polar Field strength graph, updated Thursday, continues to show a very sight trend “upward” (actually “less negative,” or back toward zero).’
” Look at the heavy black curve. Not the read and blue ones.”
FYI, the heavy black curve is the “smoothed average” of the red and blue ones.
FYI, I did look at the heavy black curve – that’s where the “very slight trend upward” is.
If you do not see the trend, I suggest using a straight edge across the minima. You should see a “very slight trend upward.” If not, there is something wrong, possibly with your straight edge. Possibly not.
>> But back to chads and data cards. That has to be a picture of a data card.
> What ‘that’? I don’t see the connection… Which figure number?
I think it must be the right side of figure 9. The aspect ratio of the little rectangles are close to the holes on “IBM cards,” though the orientation, spacing, and tri-state nature all speak against it having anything to do with an IBM card.
See http://jebrown.us/PunchCardReader/index.html for a “real” card, see http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/history.html for more history.
Leif: Figure 9. Although now that I look more closely at it, it may not be a chad data card. We configured our stack of cards to correspond with x-y axis data and punched out chads to correspond to that data. The cards where then fed into the computer for data crunching, though I have done an ANOVA the old fashioned way, by hand.
John-X (15:09:37) :
FYI, I did look at the heavy black curve – that’s where the “very slight trend upward” is.
Ah, I didn’t catch the subtlety that what you call ‘upwards’ I would call ‘downwards’, c.f. Figure 3 of http://www.leif.org/research/Cycle%2024%20Smallest%20100%20years.pdf
I would say that there is a very strong downwards trend in that the polar fields have fallen to only half of what they were 30 years ago. Now, if you want to call that a ‘very slight upwards trend’, ….
Another interpretation is that you don’t mean solar ‘minima’ but just the local minima for the heavy black curve the last 6 years, or perhaps the last 9 years [have different slopes]. I don’t know. The important fact is that within our measurement errors the polar fields have been very steady the past several years. There is an interesting aside to this: When you have ‘scattered’ light entering the measuring device, it decreases the measured magnetic field [because the scattering mixes light from different parts of the solar disk]. Now, the past few months we had hundreds or even thousands of forest fires in California. These fires put such much smoke and other gunk in the sky that the solar image was very hazy [on some days even hard to see!]. All that haze [that is only now beginning to clear – and in any event also precipitated dirt on the mirrors and lenses] scatters light and diminishes the measured values of the magnetic field. We still have to correct for that.
Ric Werme (15:31:56) :
But back to chads and data cards. That has to be a picture of … I think it must be the right side of figure 9. The aspect ratio of the little rectangles are close to the holes on “IBM cards,”
Ah, yes. I didn’t see it because we did not use ‘IBM’ punched cards with rectangular holes, but paper tape with round holes.
OT, we did our data processing and modeling on a PDP11-45 minicomputer [serial number 273!]. The machine had an atrocious ‘operating’ system, RTS, and associated Fortran compiler. Both were full of bugs and were hardly usable. Furthermore, the machine could at max only support 28K of programs and 28K of data [that is ‘K’ = 1024, not megs]. Before being invited to Stanford, I had worked for a Danish computer manufacturer writing operating systems, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RC_4000_Multiprogramming_System. Our work has served as the foundation of almost all modern operating systems. We invented [or clarified] concepts like ‘processes’ running in parallel and ‘interprocess communication’, ‘message passing’, multiprogramming kernels, and such, and had a wonderful Algol compiler. The software was [essentially – see below] bug free, [multi] user friendly, and efficient.
So, the first thing I did at Stanford was to write an ’emulator’ that emulated the RC4000 in complete detail on the PDP11. So well, that I could simply feed it the binary image of the RC4000 system and it would run that without further ado and for all intents and purposes be an RC4000. Since I was in control of the ‘hardware’ I emulated [with paging] a [for the time] HUGE internal memory of several MegaBytes. This virtual machine served the institute for a decade until the Dec Vax caught up and became a usable system. All our scientific work back then was done on the ‘virtual’ machine with round holes [which is why I was a bit slow on the chads].
Once we had RC4000 running, Phil Scherrer and myself typed in the complete source text of the system [corresponding to the binary tape] from a listing of the system as it was running at the Danish Meteorological Institute in order to make a version that was more optimized towards our use of the machine. Computer history buffs might get a kick out of that, here it is: http://www.leif.org/research/rc4000.pdf [warning 9 Mb]. This is the complete source code for the kernel, the operating system, and all the device drivers. In line 15772 you will see the correction of the one and only bug ever found. The strange language is the assembler language for the RC4000.
John-X (11:12:53) :
The latest Stanford Wilcox Polar Field strength graph, updated Thursday, continues to show a very sight trend “upward” (actually “less negative,” or back toward zero).
Can see a trend there…i have plotted the sunspot max’s and start dates on the graph. In the past the start of cycle correlates with a defined change in polarity direction which cannot be seen at present…so far.
http://users.beagle.com.au/geoffsharp/Polar.jpg
Also noticed the North and South graphs are quite diff in shape in this cycle.
http://wso.stanford.edu/gifs/south.gif
http://wso.stanford.edu/gifs/north.gif
Leif Svalgaard (17:26:32) :
Uh oh, don’t go there… Anthony – please bear with us.
Oh dear, you went there. RTS? You probably meant RSTS, unless you meant RSX which you would have hated much more. I worked at DEC on the PDP-10 operating systems (much better) and did a fair amount of PDP-11 code. Before that, I spent four years at Carnegie-Mellon as a student then two more working for the Computer Science Dept. Alan Perlis, one of the developers of Algol, taught the lecture portion of the “Computer Programming and Problem Solving I” course and used the very nice Algol on the Univac 1108. Per Brinch Hansen was my instructor for an OS course (around 1970). Nico Haberman was there too – do all you Danes speak as quietly?
Sounds slow! Actually, the 11/45 was pretty speedy. My Roses graphics hack could generate 3000 vectors per second on a 11/45. Our vector graphics hardware did the busywork of drawing the lines on the screen.
System emulators on modern systems (including desktops) often run much faster today than they did on the original (million dollar) hardware.
After leaving DEC in 1978, I wound up back there on working on their OSF/1 based Unix system, OSF/1 came from Rick Rashid at CMU and had a microkernel design, though it was so deep in the system to be all but invisible.
Some of us oldsters were running multi tasking real time operating systems in 1965 at Astrodata. All written in assembly. I still write in assembly today. Some of us still use our own operating systems, orders of magnitude more reliable than what one can purchase. I do remember paper tape punched on a Friden Flexowriter to write softeware for a Univac processor. I wrote a real time emulator for the Saber communications front end, to help debug the operating system, maybe 1969. Lots of history. Even back then I realized the importance of archiving paper tapes, punched cards, later tape , then disks, then version control files. So we can see what our left and right hands have in concert done. Kind of all off topic except for keeping track of our data sets so we will know what we think happened some time in the future when we are all smarter.
Very low magnetic activity? I thought we had a few strong stroms these days.. A K6, which is already high in my sense, with huge and beautiful aurorae.
nobwainer (20:34:03) :
In the past the start of cycle correlates with a defined change in polarity direction which cannot be seen at present…so far.
What you see is that solar max is the time when the polar fields pass through zero. If not, just move you red square [an alternative ‘definition’ of solar max is when the polar fields reverse!]. The polar fields are quite steady until the new cycle starts [blue square] then begin their slow decline. You can with confidence place a blue square at the right-hand edge, then everything fits.
Also noticed the North and South graphs are quite diff in shape in this cycle.
Not just in this cycle, but in all cycles we have observed to far. We don’t know if this is just coincidence or what the cause [if any] of this is. One thought is that there may be a ‘relic’ field deep inside the Sun. This is just speculation and not to be taken too seriously.
Flanagan (02:29:13) :
Very low magnetic activity? I thought we had a few strong storms these days
These storms [as most] are not caused directly by sunspots [but by dynamic processes in the solar wind], so there is no contradiction.
Ric Werme (21:59:01) :
Oh dear, you went there. RTS? You probably meant RSTS, unless you meant RSX which you would have hated much more.
Whatever it was; I only used it for one day, then decided it was useless and started writing the emulator.
all intents and purposes be an RC4000. …
Sounds slow! Actually, the 11/45 was pretty speedy.
It was not slow at all. I put the address calculation [which was the bottleneck] into very fast ‘diode’ memory [I had all of 512 bits of it] and passed the floating point instructions straight through to the FPU, so in practice the emulator was only twice as slow, but it was hundreds of times more useful, and that is what counts. And to come back on topic: the PDP11-10 that ran the Wilcox Solar Observatory was emulating a virtual ‘telescope control computer’ we had designed for that purpose. Actually, now it is a PC, emulating the old PDP11-10, emulating the ‘telescope computer’. Usability is what counts. In fact, inside the PC is microcode that emulates the original Intel386 instruction set. Layers upon layers…
Leif Svalgaard (03:50:30) :
you meant RSX which you would have hated much more….
Whatever it was; I only used it for one day, then decided it was useless and started writing the emulator.
The emulator didn’t run under RSwhatever, but ran on the ‘bare metal’, of course, without any underlying OS or file system. In fact, I even removed RSWhatever from the system [to save disk space] to some consternation of the Service Engineer…
I grew up on an 11/70 running RSTS in high school. Taught myself programing using Basic Plus. And hacked my way through the system by year-end.
Fond memories – Thanks.
nobwainer (20:34:03) :
In the past the start of cycle correlates with a defined change in polarity direction which cannot be seen at present…so far.
Leif says
What you see is that solar max is the time when the polar fields pass through zero. If not, just move you red square [an alternative ‘definition’ of solar max is when the polar fields reverse!]. The polar fields are quite steady until the new cycle starts [blue square] then begin their slow decline. You can with confidence place a blue square at the right-hand edge, then everything fits.
not sure i see your point Leif, i have my red square at polarity change….it seems there is a lag in the polar index before the decline starts?….and the decline hasnt happened yet in real time.
Also noticed the North and South graphs are quite diff in shape in this cycle.
Leif says..Not just in this cycle, but in all cycles we have observed to far. We don’t know if this is just coincidence or what the cause [if any] of this is. One thought is that there may be a ‘relic’ field deep inside the Sun. This is just speculation and not to be taken too seriously.
riveting stuff…the knowledge base is astounding lol.
i compared the last 2 cycles with respect to nth and sth and they were pretty close…perhaps this cycle they are not so close. Maybe we are in for some “phase catastrophes” 🙂
Well, excuse me but the article is about the sun magnetic activity
A great poet on scepticism (from a letter of John Keats).
‘…Negative capability… [occurs] when man is capable of being in uncertainties,
Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching out after fact & reason.’
This is not, I would argue, Romantic celebration of the irrational, nor an excuse for intellectual laziness; the key word is ‘irritable’.
nobwainer (04:37:03) :
not sure i see your point Leif, i have my red square at polarity change….it seems there is a lag in the polar index before the decline starts?….and the decline hasnt happened yet in real time.
Let me try again:
1) the blue squares should be moved one or two years to earlier times
2) the red squares are not when the polarity changes. Or you need to specify what that means. Polarity changes sign? No, that cannot be. Polarity begins to decline? Maybe that is it. Then the red squares should be right where the polarity stops being constant, and that is right now for the leftmost square that you can safely put in. You say it hasn’t started yet. But that doesn’t matter. What causes the polar fields to decrease is the emergence of new SC24 spots at high latitudes. Such spots are here [have been here for a a few months] and the polar flux will start to decrease within weeks
riveting stuff…the knowledge base is astounding lol.
Knowledge is no laughing matter.
Maybe we are in for some “phase catastrophes” 🙂
Naw, that is just pseudo-science. Tell us in your own words what a phase catastrophe is.
Flanagan (04:54:02) :
Well, excuse me but the article is about the sun magnetic activity
You are hereby excused. Which solar ‘storms’ were you then referring to? I thought that K=6 and aurorae were on the Earth, not on the Sun…
Flanagan (04:54:02) :
Well, excuse me but the article is about the sun magnetic activity
“It is an Ancient Programmer, and he stoppeth one of three….”
Unfortunately, I’m a far better programmer than poet, or else I’d have rewritten The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by now.
Be very glad we’re showing some restraint! 🙂
‘Can see a trend there…i have plotted the sunspot max’s and start dates on the graph. In the past the start of cycle correlates with a defined change in polarity direction which cannot be seen at present…so far.’
Looks to be just hanging around losing amplitude. At that rate of incline towards zero, we’ll be talking about this for the next 80 years.
Leif Svalgaard (05:52:07) :
[…]that is right now for the square at the right-hand edge that you can safely put in.[…]
Leif: I have a small hope.
…..These storms [the most] are not directly caused by sunspots [but by dynamic processes in the solar wind], so there is no contradiction.
not directly … maybe …. indirectly.
Waiting, a minimum period (blank) and a new group of real sunspots.
You are really a great scientist.
agradecido,
The Wilcox graphs are interesting. Evidence of ‘funk’?
Fernando (10:03:00) :
Waiting, a minimum period (blank) and a new group of real sunspots.
What so frustrated scientists up to about 1975 was there seemed to be two kinds of storms, moderate ones that were not related to sunspots [actually seemed to come from regions that avoided spots – today called coronal holes – then called ‘the cone of avoidance’], but whenever we had a really big sunspot group that would almost always be the cause of a very strong storm. how to explain both?