As many regular readers know, I’ve pointed out several times the incident of the abrupt and sustained lowering of the Ap Index which occurred in October 2005. The abrupt step change seemed (to me) to be out of place with the data, and the fact that the sun seems so have reestablished at a lower plateau of the Ap index after that event and has not recovered is an anomaly worth investigating.
From the data provided by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) you can see just how little Ap magnetic activity there has been since. Here’s a graph from October 2008 showing the step in october 2005:
click for a larger image
However, some have suggested that this event doesn’t merit attention, and that it is not particularly unusual. I beg to differ. Here’s why.
In mid December I started working with Paul Stanko, who has an active interest in the solar data and saw what I saw in the Ap Index. He did some research and found Ap data that goes back further, all the way to 1932. His source for the data is the SPIDR (Space Physics Interactive Data Resource) which is a division of NOAA’s National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC). He did some data import and put it all into a mult-page Excel spreadsheet which you can access here.
I had planned to do more study of it, but you know how holidays are, lot’s of things to do with that free time. I didn’t get back to looking at it until today, especially after SWPC updated their solar datasets on January 3rd, including the Ap Index. Looking at the data to 1932, it was clear to me that what we are seeing today for levels doesn’t exist in the record.
About the same time, I got an email from David Archibald, showing his graph of the Ap Index, graphed back to 1932. Having two independent sources of confirmation, I’ve decided to post this then. The solar average geomagnetic planetary index, Ap is at its lowest level in 75 years, for the entirety of the record:
Click for a larger image – I’ve added some annotation to the graph provided by Archibald to point out areas of interest and to clarify some aspects of it for the novice reader.
The last time the Ap index was this low was 1933. The December 2008 Ap value of 2, released by SWPC yesterday, has never been this low. (Note: Leif Svalgaard contends this value is erroneous, and that 4.2 is the correct value – either way, it is still lower than 1933) Further, the trend from October 2005 continues to decline after being on a fairly level plateau for two years. It has started a decline again in the last year.
This Ap index is a proxy that tells us that the sun is now quite inactive, and the other indices of sunspot index and 10.7 radio flux also confirm this. The sun is in a full blown funk, and your guess is as good as mine as to when it might pull out of it. So far, predictions by NOAA’s SWPC and NASA’s Hathway have not been near the reality that is being measured.
The starting gate for solar cycle 24 opened ayear ago today, when I announced the first ever cycle 24 sunspot. However in the year since, it has become increasingly clear that the horse hasn’t left the gate, and may very well be lame.
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Re:des332 (01:10:26) :
what happens if it hits zero?
Good question. Does anyone know the answer? Would it be something of significance, or is reaching zero somehow impossible?
The aa index is also low – here’s a picture of the period since 1878 of AA* >60
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/GEOMAG/image/aastar07.jpg
It’s too early to say if this is telling us much but if you look at this paper-
http://www.biokurs.de/treibhaus/literatur/sonstige/solard.pdf
and especially the chart at ‘figure 2’ which shows the derived aa index back to 100 AD and highlights that there is a clear link with a very low aa index and Wolf, Spoerer and Maunder (interestingly Dalton is not as deep nor as prolonged a dip).
It will be interesting to see how this develops over the next few years.
JP (05:18:50) :
I think it will be difficult if not impossible to correlate solar activity and global climate -at least in the short run.
Not impossible:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1980/mean:38/detrend:0.4/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1980/mean:1/scale:0.0012/offset:-0.3/plot/pmod/from:1980/offset:-1368.9/mean:2/scale:0.12
Sorry my prior post should read “derived aa index back to 1100 AD”
My! It’s ‘discuss America’ time!
“‘…even though you were late and made poor excuses..’ The Americans should never have bothered have turning up at all? Look what ‘winning’ did for you!”
If I recall correctly, the main assistance the US provided in WW2 was economic. It’s hard to compare fighting in a meaningful way, but if we take ‘total deaths’as a measure of how ‘hard’ the fighting was, the US was the lowest ‘provider’, just above the Netherlands. But the US did very well out of the economic side afterwards, so it was well worth turning up for them…
Of course, if you measure things like this, WW2 turns out to be primarily a war between Russia and Germany, with a few other countries on the sidelines. Which I happen to think is pretty accurate.
“When we were just about to break the sound barrier the US said they’d give us all they knew about building a Hydrogen bomb if we gave them the secret of how to break through the sound barrier. Seemed like a fair trade at the time..”
AFAIR, the Brits STARTED building the A-bomb, moved all our people to the US when the Manhatten project started, and then got frozen out by Congress after the war ended. Hydrogen bombs came later. http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-institutions_government/nagasaki_2733.jsp refers.
The Sound Barrier was simply given to the US by the British politicians at the time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_M.52 refers. In fact, I suspect the decision made sense at the time – it was assumed that future air wars would be fought with robot missiles, so there was little point developing fast manned aircraft.
The December 2008 Ap value of 2, released by SWPC yesterday, has never been this low.
This is because the SWPC values are not correct.
Here are ap values for the past 12 months:
1 7.8
2 11.0
3 11.1
4 9.2
5 6.3
6 6.7
7 5.4
8 5.0
9 5.6
10 6.5
11 4.2
12 4.2
Use http://www.geomag.bgs.ac.uk/gifs/apindex.html to get ap for any month.
REPLY: Alright, but don’t leave us hanging. WHY are they wrong? SWPC cites this as the source for the Ap data:
# Source Ap: GeoForschungsZentrum, Postdam, Germany
# Prior to January 1997, Institut fur Geophysik, Gottingen, Germany
– Anthony
I am not alleging a causal connection (with the sun activity) here, but I visited the AMU web-page today, and discovered some rather striking results (I think) .
At 5 mb, the temperature is now 0.30 warmer than same date (jan 3rd) last year,
at 10 mb , 0.30 warmer
at 600 mb 0.80 cooler, and
at 900 mb 0.42 cooler.
Are we moving towards a new reversal of the stratospheric cooling – surface heating trend we have seen the latter decade(s)?
If so, I assume this should have some sgnificance for the skill of the models?
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
Chris Schoneveld
The paper I refer to above is the Duhau & de Jager paper you referred to in an earlier thread/posted comment.
After yesterday’s posting of the solar cycles graphsequations, I had an email from a solar scientist (not subscribing to the planetary link, wishes to stay anonymous) suggesting that if in the periodicity equation 2pi/3 factor is changed to 2pi/4 (pi/2) a far better agreement is reached between the periodicity and the amplitude waveforms. I agree: so here is the new issue.
http://www.vukcevic.co.uk/combined.gif
http://www.vukcevic.co.uk/combined1650.gif
http://www.vukcevic.co.uk/GrandMinima.gif
Stephen Wilde: “combining solar variability with ocean variability largely resolves the problem of time lags and poor fit between solar variability and temperature.”
Then, what happened then, years before the big 1998 El Nino, which was the cause of all the global warming hysteria?, perhaps the 1989 change of direction in Sun´s orbit around the barycenter?
Tom Woods,
You can add 0.2°C to your estimates.
It wasn’t that cold!
January will be colder though.
The latest SSTs are charted:
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/climo&hot.html
Looks a little bluer than last week.
Adolfo,
The PDO went positive around 1975 which combined with a very active sun and caused the observed warming which continued up to the 1998 peak.
I would like people to stop talking about 1998 being the warmest year on record altogether. This only applies for the last 30 years if that, any farther back and you are comparing apples and oranges as far as the data available and it’s manipulation.
As to 1934 only being warmer in the US I would suggest the quality of the data makes the likely error far larger than the temperature variation both in the US and in the world as a whole.
Joseph (05:58:47) :
what happens if it hits zero?
Good question. Does anyone know the answer? Would it be something of significance, or is reaching zero somehow impossible?
ap can be zero. It is measured every three hours and a 3-hour value is often zero. Sometimes all eight 3-hour values in a day are zero, then ap for the day [called Ap] is zero. It has never happened [yet] that Ap for every day of a month has been zero.
An ap value of zero simply means that geomagnetic activity has been too weak to measure for that 3-hour interval. The 1st and 2nd of December 2008 had Ap=0, so did 12 Oct 1954 and 23 Dec 1935, but such day are rare.
The scientists have the UN’s permission for their experiment and that eliminates any possible danger to the environment.
The question is: Will Nature save us from the scientists?
————————————————————-
Amazing discovery of green algae which could save the world from global warming
http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1104772/Amazing-discovery-green-algae-save-world-global-warming.html?printingPage=true
British scientists have discovered that green algae “could” bury CO2 omissions at the bottom of the ocean.
Lead researcher Professor Rob Raiswell, from Leeds University, said: ‘The Earth itself seems to want to save us.’
Scientists already knew that releasing iron into the sea stimulates the growth of algae. But environmentalists had warned that to do so artificially might damage the planet’s fragile ecosystem.
Leif Svalgaard (06:21:53) :
This is because the SWPC values are not correct.
REPLY: Alright, but don’t leave us hanging. WHY are they wrong? SWPC cites this as the source for the Ap data:
# Source Ap: GeoForschungsZentrum, Postdam, Germany
They lie to you. Or rather, they are sloppy. The Air Force [USAF, AFWA, Offutt AFB] has its own service to provide a preliminary ap value in real time. SWPC uses those real-time preliminary values and never bothers to replace them with the Potsdam values which are generally available a few hours later, e.g. right now Potsdam reports:
Date ap-indices Ap
01-01-2009 5 9 12 7 7 5 3 6 7 Est.
02-01-2009 2 3 0 2 2 6 7 15 5 Est.
03-01-2009 12 15 12 22 7 12 3 6 11 Est.
04-01-2009 7 3 2 4 2 7 5 2 4 Est.
05-01-2009 5 5 3 2 0 *** *** *** 3 Est.
REPLY: Great, just great. Who to trust these days? Which dataset is real? Which dataset is current? Which dataset is “adjusted”? The answers to these questions should NOT be known only to insiders. If the data is put out for public consumption, its is assumed to be correct. So much for data integrity. – Anthony
Stephen Wilde said….
“The PDO went positive around 1975 which combined with a very active sun and caused the observed warming which continued up to the 1998 peak”.
Well Stephen, don’t you think you’re sticking your neck out here just a little. To make this statement with such confidence strikes me as being every bit as contentious as stating that Anth. CO2 is the main driver of GW!! Suffice to say that time will very soon be the judge of whether you are right or wrong.
As regards solar activity and temp, I have to say that it seems a pretty loose fit to me. Yes, in a very general way they match excluding 1930’s-early 40’s. But of more concern to me is the radical deviation in recent decades where solar activity while dropping like a stone, is in stark contrast to temps going through the roof. While temps did indeed spike in 1998, we have still observed 7 of the hottest years on record since 2000, which for me represents continued warming.
Looking at the graphs, it feels a bit like being lost in the hills with map & compass. Desperately looking around to make features fit the map, I’m alarmed by the big hill right in front of me that doesn’t appear on my map. What is the more likely scenario?? – the map is wrong (unlikely) or I’m misinterpreting the map (probably)!
Ben
“The hottest year globally was 1998”
My, the historical revisionists are out in force!
The hottest year in the SH was 1941. The PDO and AMO went positive simultaneously circa 1930 releasing solar energy integrated over the preceding decade.
The PDO has just turned negative with the AMO to follow during this tenure. We, at present are experiencing a solar minimum of at least twice the length to which we are accustomed with all the consequences that normally attend.
Expect the next decade to be the coldest your memories, however acute they may be.
Ben,
I’m prepared to stick my neck out because the oceanic effect via multidecadal cycles is so large that it swamps pretty much everything else including (especially ?) anthro CO2.
I’m aware that time could prove me wrong but if I’m proved right I will have done the planet and humankind a service
If I pay attention to Leif Svalgaard, studying the sun is a waste of money. No matter what the sun does, there is zero effect. Why waste the money? In the end there is nothing man can do anyhow. Live in Sod houses and ride bicycles made and sold by some world Governement that is controlled by, MAN!
Anthony –
I see that Leif already answered your question. I was thinking that it was possible that the left hand (SWPC) and the right hand (SPIDR) don’t know what the other is doing. I just downloaded that spreadsheet that you’ve got on surfacestations that Paul Stanko created and the values shown there for 2008 are close to the values Leif listed and are different from those shown by SWPC. In any case, the most recent Ap values are still the lowest ever in the record as the previous low was set Nov ’34 at 4.8.
Re: Leif Svalgaard (07:30:59)
Okay… Then what does a graph of the 1932-2008 Ap index using the correct numbers look like? Does the same relationship still hold? Is the “Ap is at its lowest level in 75 years, for the entirety of the record”?
Sea Ice Ends Year at Same Level as 1979
http://www.dailytech.com/Article.aspx?newsid=13834
Ice levels had been tracking lower throughout much of 2008, but rapidly recovered in the last quarter. In fact, the rate of increase from September onward is the fastest rate of change on record, either upwards or downwards.
Another model bites the dust. Computer models are not science, when will we learn.
If the sun doesn’t control the climate, made we should check some boundary conditions. Let’s see, when the sun’s output doubles, and now let’s check when the output halves.
Ben,
If one encounters a peak or a trough then the highest/lowest are bound to be clustered around both sides of the peak/trough.
Thus the assertion that we have experienced x number of the warmest years since 2000 is not inconsistent with having passed the peak and being on a cooling trend.
AGW proponents are just trying to gain time by expressing the issue in the way that has confused you.