The Sun today
Solar cycle 24 still getting a slow and very delayed start. This is the third one of these (that I know of) this past year.
From SIDC (Solar Influences Data analysis Center) in Belgium: http://sidc.oma.be/products/quieta/
:Issued: 2008 Dec 14 1156 UTC :Product: documentation at http://www.sidc.be/products/quieta #--------------------------------------------------------------------# # From the SIDC (RWC-Belgium): "ALL QUIET" ALERT # #--------------------------------------------------------------------# START OF ALL QUIET ALERT ....................... The SIDC - RWC Belgium expects quiet Space Weather conditions for the next 48 hours or until further notice. This implies that: * the solar X-ray output is expected to remain below C-class level, * the K_p index is expected to remain below 5, * the high-energy proton fluxes are expected to remain below the event threshold. #--------------------------------------------------------------------# # Solar Influences Data analysis Center - RWC Belgium # # Royal Observatory of Belgium # # Fax : 32 (0) 2 373 0 224 # # Tel.: 32 (0) 2 373 0 491 # # # # For more information, see http://www.sidc.be. Please do not reply # # directly to this message, but send comments and suggestions to # # 'sidctech@oma.be'. If you are unable to use that address, use # # 'rvdlinden@spd.aas.org' instead. # # To unsubscribe, visit http://sidc.be/registration/unsub.php # #--------------------------------------------------------------------# (h/t to sunspotter)
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For all you folks shivering in US right now, data from NCDC says west side of country was radically HOTTER in November that average. Now you’re getting a cold blast.
Over here in Europe, we’ve had a pretty cold November and very cold early December. That might be about to change in about a week. Big time.
Any linkages noticed/developed/reported between step changes in US weather and Western European weather? Was thinking on the lines of: blocking Pacific fronts penetrating the US west coast linked to greater fronts migrating from Gulf of Mexico North East and hence going across to Europe to give us rain and snow.
Any reports on that chaps?
Basil (12:46:18) :
And nothing on stereo behind, either.
It seems that sunspot 1009 didn’t even make one rotation of the Sun.
Q for Leif: How often do Sunspots complete rotations of the Sun, ie what’s their typical duration? Current ones seem to be very shortlived.
BTW UK Treasury still has that article on SOlar Cycle 24/25 by David C Archibald from Western Australia claiming a reduced global temperature of 1.5°C to 2020 due to poor cycles 24 & 25. Well that’s wiped out all the warming to 1998 then hasn’t it? No problem!
There’s also a few others added lately with one by retired electrical engineer David Holland, MIEE very interesting.
How curious?
jorgekafkazar (22:43:35) :
Carsten Arnholm, Norway (00:38:11) :
Sunspots prefer to be born on the far side rather than on the “western hemisphere”? Is there an observational bias or a physical correlation with the direction to earth?
There is no generally accepted explanation. Some explanations are considered in http://fenyi.sci.klte.hu/publ/padeu_vol17_mezo_etal.pdf
http://www.ta3.sk/caosp/Eedition/FullTexts/vol4/pp6-24.pdf
and my favorite:
http://www.star.uclan.ac.uk/~sdalla/minnaert1939.pdf
nobwainer (Geoff Sharp) (01:19:36) :
Basically what caused the deep minima of the past is waning, but still strong enough to throw a cycle or 2 into chaos.
Worthless pseudo-science.
OT, but the human population “bottleneck” may be no more real than Gorebull warming.
Here’s an article by a recognized expert critiqueing a paper in which he was cited as an expert who backs the theory of the bottleneck. Key words “and they refute the hypothesis”.
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/genetics/mtdna_migrations/sub-saharan-africa-population-size-behar-2008.html
Conclusion
As you can see, these data allow a direct test of the hypothesis of a 70,000-year-old bottleneck in Africa, and they refute the hypothesis. The new data allow a powerful model of ancient African population size to be built, one that comes together with archaeological data to give us a really interesting picture of the early evolution of “modern” humans. The model can be tested with new, massive sets of information from single nucleotide polymorphisms, as well as a more detailed chronology of late MSA sites.
JP (06:34:21) : The US today is far more than a few rain-starved settlements on the East Coast. We know almost nothing of the climate of 90% of the country 400 yrs. ago.
Judging by the long dry spells in the SouthEast, though, shades of things to come in a sneak preview.
Leif: is the Western Limb of the Sun as we view it from Earth somehow the direction of motion of our star through the Milky Way? I’d buy a bow-shock effect, but beyond that the imagination is stretched.
Robert Wood (06:58:06) :
How often do Sunspots complete rotations of the Sun, ie what’s their typical duration? Current ones seem to be very shortlived.
Lifetime depends on size:
http://www.ips.gov.au/Educational/2/2/2
Big spots live longer. Small ones don’t.
Robert Bateman (08:11:33) :
is the Western Limb of the Sun as we view it from Earth somehow the direction of motion of our star through the Milky Way?
Because the Earth goes around the Sun in one year, the direction to the western limb sweeps through all 360 degrees in the course of the year, so answer is ‘no’.
Leif, There is snow all around the world breaking records everyone’s freezing. Piers Corbyn is getting brilliant results with his updated technique including last weeks flooding in Britain to the day months in advance he’s predicting a UK White Christmas someone whose technique you say can’t work when you don’t know what it is. Yet your acting like the objective voice of the absolute. Shake it off there’s loads you don’t know. No change on your part in face of this can only be lucky. Its not good science. Ed
dennis ward (23:49:33) :
“And what happens if we squander all the fossil fuels and THEN an ice age occurs ?”
We will never be out of energy.
The only factor for a tight oil market is refinery capacity.
We have sufficient oil, coal and gas to serve us for the next 300 to 400 years.
This is sufficient time to develop some real alternatives.
The only threat to human kind is the political decision to reverse development as the greens have in mind.
Anyway, it is a very bad idea to restrict the use of carbon fuels and force energy technologies up on people that do not have the potential to generate comparable capacity in out put at an economical price level at this moment in time.
The retarded idea to fuel up cars with corn has brought almost 1 billion people on the verge of starvation.
Wind mills are in need of back up power plants so people pay twice or three times the price compared to coal.
Solar is a real alternative in a limited part of the world but still lacks affordable storage.
Nuclear is dead on a political level but it will be the future.
Especially since a Japanese scientist has developed a method to extract uranium from sea water.
This is sufficient output to energize the world for the next 100.000 years.
Now on the market is a miniature nuclear power plant that comes at a container size.
It’s buried in the ground and delivers sufficient energy to power 20.000 homes for a period of seven years.
We run out of energy when we run out of planet.
Until we develop cheap high power batteries at low prices I do not see to many electrical cars on the roads.
The new generation high performance diesel engines are superior to hybrids and at a fuel price of 1.50 a gallon hybrids and electric won’t sell.
Therefor I think that the combustion engine will be with us for decades to come.
If you want to pay for the “Green Dreams” of the political establishment, it’s your money.
In general I think people worry to much and lack common sense.
That is why our mad politicians get where they are today.
You simply shout the word “Change” a few times and you are elected in office.
Unbelievable if you are familiar with the “Green Dreams” of this guy.
Bankrupt coal and set up a Civil Army to suppress the uprisings when people lack the energy to heat there homes!
David Archibald has it right, a 13 year long cycle 23 will lead to 2.5 degree celcius loss of temperature (some has already occurred), and this period will last 30 years or more. The cooling will be four times larger than the warming of the second half of the 20th century.
http://www.warwickhughes.com/agri/Solar_Arch_NY_Mar2_08.pdf
If you compare solar cycle length to temperature record, there is a definate correlation between the two.
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://icecap.us/images/uploads/HanoverNH.JPG&imgrefurl=http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2008/08/david-archibald-on-solar-minimum-and.html&usg=__L-JEid7fzssq2II0D0Jndsbx90A=&h=426&w=627&sz=33&hl=en&start=2&sig2=ILobo5pwvFL8er07lKZusQ&tbnid=d_P8FMoex2GHmM:&tbnh=92&tbnw=136&ei=rpBGSbmWEYiDtwe3sYjLCA&prev=/images%3Fq%3Ddavid%2Barchibald%2Bsolar%2Bcycles%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG
Hansen has bet the farm on his global warming theories, while I am sure he would like his theories to come true, he appears to be even more interested in CO2 controls being introduced so that man’s activities can be regulated.
The Politics is more important than the science.
Edward Morgan (09:08:10) :
Piers Corbyn is getting brilliant results with his updated technique including last weeks flooding in Britain to the day months in advance he’s predicting a UK White Christmas someone whose technique you say can’t work when you don’t know what it is.
Corbyn is not telling what it is. So, whatever it is, tea leaves? or voodoo? doesn’t count in my book.
geoff pohanka (09:19:02) :
David Archibald has it right, a 13 year long cycle 23 will lead to 2.5 degree celcius loss of temperature
We are already past the minimum [August 2008] for a cycle length of ~12 years.
Corbyn’s is using historic records of sunspot count against historic weather records (upcycle, max, downcycle, min for appropriate annual seasons). Since numbers differ then temperature and precipitation projections are adjusted accordingly.
Robert,
I think we have a pretty good idea of our continent 400-500 years ago; it was very dry. Much of the Southeast was ravaged by forest fires akin to those we see in the Desert SW today. I tend to agree with those who look at precipitation as much as temperature to demark climate cycles. North American Climate is determined by the interaction of the NAO, AMO, and ENSO. During the LIA, the Northern Rockies were bitterly cold, but had periods of high precip. Ditto for the Great Lakes. So Cal had mild summers, cold winters, but the interior of the high deserts into the SW were very dry. The Plains through the Southeast and Southern Appalachia were dry; New England had extreme shifts between drought and bitterly cold temps.
I was wondering if the “eastern limb” vs. “western limb” thing might just be that sunspots starting on the eastern limb have more chance of lasting longer (from our point of view) and therefore “count” more.
Lief Svalgaard:-)
Firstly, big respect! :-))
However, although Piers Corbyn may not be telling us “what it is”, he is getting it pretty tight! I he was that bad, he’d have gone out of business by now. Hadley/Tyndall Centre have their fancy taxpayer funded Models but keep things close to their chest, if they can understand them themselves, but are not getting it that right. 2007 saw awful flooding in ares that have historically always been a flood risk, the Met Office didn’t predict these until the last moment, ditto 2008 they said “highly unlikely” based on models a year in advance, they got it wrong in 2008.
The older I get the more I see the scientific world dependent upon computer models, with observations being seconded to the archives. I’ll stick to my sea weed & crystal ball gazing, & the occasional look out the window! The times I have watched a weather forecast in disbelief yelled at the tv “come & look out the window”! It’s all to do with this hype in computer power & long-term weather forecasting, & yes they are more accurate over a week or month, but not that accurate, they never get it bang on every time or even the majority of the time, when it goes wrong they bring out all sorts of excuses why they were fooled, slyly letting it out that climate is unpredictable when it suits them! In their defence, the weather guys are NOT the Climate Change HIWTYL guys, different department, same bureaucrats though! As I have said before, when the UK Met Office can tell what the temp will be a week in advance to the exact measurement (well within ½ a degree) then I’ll believe what they reckon global temps will be in 50-100 years time! I expect they will say the recent beautiful alignment of the crescent moon straddled by Jupiter & Venus on December 1, 2 3 was to blame.
BTW, it’s getting cold again tonight, logs are in, scuttle is full, gas fires lit, brrrrrr! A glass of red is in order tonight with my Saturday night left-overs!
Lately every time I see a sunspot at the SOHO link, I scratch at my laptop monitor and it goes away. SOHO is a great website for monitor cleanliness.
Leif come on, we are all making sense. What’s wrong with that. Follow the thread. Ed
Alan the Brit said :
But the computer models ARE crystal ball gazing, meaning rubbish.
Since we have no rational explanation for the East West sunspot dilemna:
It’s our supermagnet we carry below us. Like Leif says, the effect is persistent as we go around the sun in a year and it’s spinning relative to us anyways. So it has to be US.
Just when you get confident that the Earth is insignificant and puny, up pops something like this that blows the doors off.
Don’t worry, though, it will take at least 300 years to figure out why.
Robert Bateman (13:26:22) :
Since we have no rational explanation for the East West sunspot dilemna:
It’s our supermagnet we carry below us. ……….. So it has to be US.
Just when you get confident that the Earth is insignificant and puny, up pops something like this that blows the doors off.
Mr Bateman
For a possible answer see:
http://www.vukcevic.co.uk Solar Subcycle link
vukcevic:
It surely isn’t good at predicting the amplitude of solar cycles.
The data is to the left, right, above and below that recurring pattern.
I don’t see what it is that it’s supposed to tell me.
You could explain that.
I’ll listen.
The ‘stereo behind’ I believe is a satellite out in Earth orbit that trails the Earth. It shows us a portion of the Sun that is not yet, but about to, rotate into view. When we have an “All Quiet Alert”, it means that there is no visible activity on the Sun plus the Stereo Behind also shows nothing going on that will rotate into view in several days.
Just watch for that co-rotating Coronal Hole on Stereo Behind show up on the leading limb, wait a couple of days, and you will see it again in the current image of the Sun from Earth.
Kinda cool.
Mr. Bateman
Existence of 400 day sub cycle could either be a coincidence or as suggested in the article (http://www.vukcevic.co.uk, link solar sub cycle) result of the Earth/Jupiter magnetospheric interaction. If the later is correct than there is an indirect link between solar activity and the Earth’s magnetosphere and a possible explanation for the “perceived” imbalance in East-West hemisphere as viewed from the Earth’s direction.