The last time we saw would could have been a cycle 24 sunspot, was on January 20th, 2009, but it was an oddball, and not clearly part of cycle 23 or 24. Spaceweather.com wrote that day:
A new sunspot [1011] is emerging inside the circle region–and it is a strange one. The low latitude of the spot suggests it is a member of old Solar Cycle 23, yet the magnetic polarity of the spot is ambiguous, identifying it with neither old Solar Cycle 23 nor new Solar Cycle 24. Stay tuned for updates as the sunspot grows.
The last time we had a true cycle 24 spot was on January 10th thru the 13th, with sunspot 1010, which had both the correct polarity and a high latitude characteristic of a cycle 24 spot. But since then no other cycle 24 spots have emerged.
It has been slow going for cycle 24.
We did have a single cycle 23 spot in February as you can see from the SWPC sunspots data, but it has been dead quiet on all other solar activity indices:
:Product: Daily Solar Data DSD.txt :Issued: 0225 UT 22 Feb 2009 # # Prepared by the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, NOAA, Space Weather Prediction Center # Please send comments and suggestions to SWPC.Webmaster@noaa.gov # # Last 30 Days Daily Solar Data # # Sunspot Stanford GOES10 # Radio SESC Area Solar X-Ray ------ Flares ------ # Flux Sunspot 10E-6 New Mean Bkgd X-Ray Optical # Date 10.7cm Number Hemis. Regions Field Flux C M X S 1 2 3 #--------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2009 01 23 70 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 01 24 69 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 01 25 70 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 01 26 70 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 01 27 70 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 01 28 70 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 01 29 69 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 01 30 69 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 01 31 69 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 02 01 70 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 02 02 69 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 02 03 69 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 02 04 70 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 02 05 70 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 02 06 70 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 02 07 71 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 02 08 71 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 02 09 71 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 02 10 68 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 02 11 70 11 10 1 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 02 12 70 11 10 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 02 13 70 11 10 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 02 14 70 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 02 15 70 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 02 16 70 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 02 17 71 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 02 18 70 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 02 19 69 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 02 20 69 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 02 21 71 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Have people noticed that pretty much all SC24 microsunspots have showed in the south pole side of the sun?
Leo Danze:
Aha interesting theory there…. perhaps it is a mixture of magma and solar forcings… but then again… what drives the convection currents in the mantle?
I think that you can keep going back to look for drivers and I agree with the notion that ocean currents have a more direct effect on climate than the sun but the root influence of all the phenomena discussed is the sun!
Think of it as a domino effect, when something happens to the sun, the effect gets carried through the processes to the final product of temp. Question is how much of this effect is amplified and how much reaches that far with enough effect to be noticed by people…
Don’t forget this:
Sun could drive just about everything in climate and weather.
Trends in Pacific Decadal Oscillation
Subjected To Solar Forcing
by
Dr Theodor Landscheidt
http://www.john-daly.com/theodor/pdotrend.htm
Divers that go deep know that deeper is colder. Periodically, an increase in trade winds blow away the Sun warmed surface water in the Pacific and reveals the cold water below as it mixes from wind driven wave actions. This might be the case in some oscillations. Other oscillations in other oceans may happen due to melt season dumping of ice cold freshwater that sinks, thus causing a conveyor belt action. The two might work together periodically, causing colder summers that result in ice buildup over time (fresh and salt water ice from snow as well as water bodies), then when the trade winds die down, the huge amount of ice melts rapidly causing a change in conveyor belt actions. I always go back to the windshield wiper oscillation on the school bus. If two different oceanic oscillation causes occasionally and periodically work in sync, the result could be a somewhat regular long up and long down trend in global temperatures.
John A –
“I think its wonderful that Nature has provided us with a clear test of what really controls the Earth’s climate: the sun or carbon dioxide.”
I was thinking the same thing but I’m too much of an agnostic to use the capital “N” word. On the other hand maybe it’s Providence but I’m not sure if that’s capital “P” Providence or small “p” providence.
Maybe you can just thank your lucky stars? Or lucky star in this case.
Anthrodoc (06:02:33) :
I teach, and would be interested to have my students learn to follow things like this that are not in their immediate vision, but that demonstate something of the fascinating dimensions of scientific understanding.
Though the sunspot cycle is an interesting subject to be introduced to students, its connection with climate is not without a lot of controversy that would be confusing to students.
Leif, our resident sun guru, has informed us that the energy from the sun has varied very little from the little ice age to now, or from sunspot maximum to minimum, not enough to explain any warming.
There are other students of the sun cycles, ( Archibald for example who posts here too) who empirically correlate cold periods with low sunspot activity. There is not much theory behind their method, and the theories that exist, as for example the effect of galactic cosmic rays, has to be proven yet.
So although it is an interesting question, it would be rather confusing.
As far as I am concerned, I think that on a first level the ocean currents and the atmospheric winds are responsible for the climate changes we see. By inducing changes in albedo ( the percentage of sunlight reflected) due to changes in cloud cover. Large effects in the available energy can appear.
Of course on a deeper level, the currents and winds are due to the steady energy provided by the sun, as it impacts periodically on the oceans and atmosphere ( 7% seasonal variation, let alone 100% between night and day ).
These studies are in their infancy, and again not suited for students, imo.
Wow. Let’s not get our little ones all upset with hard problems.
How about saying something like “there are multiple drivers to global temperature. What could we do to correlate (or establish non-correlation) to the local variable. (Yes, Robert, the local variable is the earth’s temperature. Very good!) Yes, Wendy, we could look at the temperature trends on other planets in our solar system.”
And yes, we can. Any good students here know what the recent findings show?
Anna V,
I also teach meteorology classes. The way I handle things like this is to give them all the information. Most students (or at least the ones we are hoping will continue in our field) can understand these types of nuances.
In the sections on climate in my courses, I begin with an exhibition of climate through the ages. The MIlankovitch theory is relevant, as well as correlations between solar cycles, temperature and CO2. The debate as to the causes and effects isn’t really all that complex here and introducing them to these things actually helps generate a dynamic classroom.
I see your point that the solar-climate link is fairly light on theoretical certainty (is it a sunspot effect, an effect of tiny changes in radiation intensity, some sort of cosmic ray effect as the size of the heliosphere changes etc, etc.). However, the fact remains that the correlation of temperature with these measures of solar activity is quite strong. Then there is the famous uncertainty of cause vs. effect when we deal with the CO2-temperature correlation over the past million years (even the folks at Realclimate are starting to admit that CO2 is mainly a response in this relationship). Go back beyond that time scale (when CO2 concentrations were more saturating – ie., higher) and the CO2-temperature correlation actually disappears completely.
So, show them the past climate changes. Show them the ‘controversial’ link with solar activity. Show them the theories. Then, when considering future climates and recent climate change, also present AGW theory. This is what I do. The students find it very balanced, with some finding the AGW theory quite convincing (after all, CO2 *is* a greenhouse gas, albeit an extremely weak one), but others taking on a more skeptical perspective. The beauty is that they all get interested and want to become scientists – and you can do it without toeing the party line.
Stop worrying about your peers and your career. I did. I put my students notes online and publicly and my notes include Svensmarks’s theory, oceanic circulation effects, sun orbital effects and dust variations right alongside the IPCC charts. I give *all* of these a critical assessment. When dealing with issues such as sea ice, I teach them *both* what’s going on in the northern and southern hemisphere. I also teach them about the non-greenhouse effects of humans on climate (a la Pielke). Have I been criticised for doing all this, rather than just giving them a Goracular spiel? A little bit, yes… but I can hold my head up high with the knowledge that I am expressing myself freely in the original spirit of the university experience. My students actually talk in class as a result!
Well, no wonder you came out with that fine statement earlier. Can you clone yourself a few thousand times?
===========================================
Lulo deserves a Nobel prize.
“What I would like to know is what drives the oceanic oscillations ?
Perhaps the sun?”
A little complex. The fact that they’re oscillations is what drives them, to a certain extent. These various cycles are coupled harmonic oscillators. I’m pretty sure this was mentioned.
Now the thing about an oscillator s, given the right circumstances a very small amount of energy can be kept inside the system for a very, very long time. The classic example is a weight on a spring. It only takes a small amount of energy to get it going and once it’s going it will continue to move of its own accord. That same weight can be induced to start moving through a purely random event.
Here’s where things get a little bit interesting, at least as far as this layman is concerned. Lets say you have a few weights on springs attached to each other with more springs and bouncing up and down. Pretty soon they’ll “couple”, or start to move at some harmonic of each other’s motion. The interesting thing is that introducing an outside force to this system will only have a temporary effect. Grab one of the weights and add extra energy to it and it will bounce around wildly for a moment or two, but the other weighted springs that are attached to it will absorb and redistribute the energy across the entire system, restoring it to some form of harmonic balance.
like so.
I’m not a physicist, so my understanding of these things is certainly open to question, but the results are what matters in this instance I think. Given that all you need to get your various ocean currents moving is a pressure difference, I’m of the understanding that these various climate systems will appear all by themselves and drive themselves, reacting only to differences in energy distribution across the whole system.
Lulo: “If substantial cooling occurs, there will be egg on the faces of the Goracles”….WRONG: They already have an answer to this: “Climate Change” .”Human made CO2 originates both warm and cold climates”.
In WUWT we already have three “found-not missing-links” for Sun-Climate relation: Svensmark´s cloud forming, LOD variations, Archibald´s barycentric movements.
I agree that solar activity affects climate.
Greylar (07:22:34) :
It is official! The “Solar Minimum Has Arrived”
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/06mar_solarminimum.html
G
Ain’t that a bucket of ice water!!
It should now read: It’s official, the gas tank of the Sun has hit E, and for the last 3 years it’s been chuffing and popping on fumes.
Like a golf ball that lands on the green, continues hopping & bouncing towards the cup, then it rolls back down the green into the rough or worse.
Ray (08:03:31) :
According to my AGW model, the increased concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is masking all sunspots from our view point. In fact the sun has not changed, never changed and will never change… exactly like our models predicted. 😀
It’s called SOHO, and it picks up those microspots in outer space. Far from the maddening atmosphere. It really is that bad, and worse. And, what is really worse for the endangered species AGW, the concentration of C02 in the atmosphere the past couple of year has remained flat. Your sun isn’t being occluded by Earth’s atmosphere or anything in it, but it might be occluded by something in the Galactic Plane we are passing through.
For 2 millenia, man believed, religion taught, that the Earth was at the center of the Solar System. It had to be.
Then, we thought that we had to be at the center of the Milky Way.
Then, we thought that the Milky Way had to be at the center of the Universe.
Now, we still get these neanderthal throwbacks that want to return to the comfy world that existed in oblivion that seems so much like the good old days, and they call their puppy AGW.
What scares them is that we don’t control the physical universe.
And we never will. The Earth is dwarfed by the tiniest sunspeck.
My comment was sarcasm but maybe there is something in your response. We know that our solar system passes through “clouds” of dust in space every now and then. In fact, sometime in the future our solar system is expected to go through an area so dirty that it might do great harm to our planets. But back to this hypothesis, could it be possible that cosmic dust zones might have contributed to the cooling of our solar system by diffracting irradiation from the sun?
I believe that any such disturbance would be detectable through a significant drop in TSI. No such drop has been detected.
If substantial cooling occurs, there will be egg on the faces of the Goracles.
There already is. See Graylar’s post.
The human race is not going to believe that Global Warming causes both killer heat waves and killer cold snaps. And they don’t. They know when they are being flim-flammed by storytelling made up on the fly.
It looks like it has become inevitable.
No matter what the subject of the post is, it all ends up being haunted by good old CO2, with or without eggs.
People are obsessed with CO2 and it bears proof that 20 years of brainwashing the public with AGW BS is indeed effective.
Greylar (07:22:34) :
It is official! The “Solar Minimum Has Arrived”
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/06mar_solarminimum
An old article
Geoff,
Well stated. At the highest public policy level there is no room for untested and unproved science that disputes AGW. We have no Goracle comparable to the AGW folk. We are in for a wild ride. Politics is not the place to sort out scientific questions.
My fear is that we will have to wait for new, overwhelming physical evidence. And the burden of proof will be extremely high. Perhaps it will arise from solar physics, perhaps from oceanography, perhaps from other astronomical sciences. But it hasn’t arrived yet.
Pamela Gray (08:33:34) :
“Periodically, an increase in trade winds blow away the Sun warmed surface water in the Pacific and reveals the cold water below as it mixes from wind driven wave actions.”
I think discovered that effect on one of our Cabo trips a few years back.
The ocean water was too cold for swimming comfortably and snorkeling was brutal.
A local told me that happens occasionally. That the warm water is wiped away by ocean weather and currents.
It was a strange thing. Beautiful, warm, sunny tropical weather and cold water. Brrrrr!
And other times the water was too warm to cool you off.
Ron de Haan (07:33:02) :
I think John A and Lulo have a point. Gore and his minions have not yet admitted they are wrong. Their ability to deceive, distort and dodge keeps their reputation afloat in the public eye.
A big La Nina won’t make them admit anything either. A weak solar cycle that leads to decades of cooling will. If the recovery from the little ice age just continues at the same pace, they will continue to be hailed as heroes.
Now they won’t.
R = 1.61 FD – (0.0733 FD)** 2 + (0.0240 FD)**3
It takes a 10.7cm flux of 78 to consistently generate sunspots of the count of 10 that is currently assigned to sunpecks.
Just a little tidbit to throw out there (chum the waters of the cold PDO) for a landmark.
Who needs a landmark?
We aren’t where they said we would be in late Feb. 2009.
We weren’t where they said we would be in late Feb. 2008.
We weren’t where they said we would be in late Feb 2007.
Kick the can down the road. Stay the course, a horse, of course, a talking horse. Say hello to Mr. Ed.
Enjoy the 3rd day of blank Magnetogram.
Enjoy the 40th day since the last SC24 spot.
Be thankful that their prediction of frying and inundated coastlines ain’t happening.
Something else is.
Hmmm so if magnetic fields are the main factor in climate perhaps we should install a giant Q-bracelet magnetic healing bracelet around the Earth. It works for humans, doesn’t it?
E-week banquet here in Anchorage last night I was surprised the keynote speaker was Syun-Ichi Akasofu, founder of IARC. I thought most of my engineering colleagues were firmly AGW, those that thought about it anyway. But the relevant committee did ask him to come and he was warmly received. It was a lot of fun. His impatience with IPCC is not so thinly disguised. If curious: http://www.iarc.uaf.edu/people/indiv/iarc_all_staff.php?photo=sakasofu
Alright, now who turned off the sun? Come on, fess up!
It was Hansen’s hubris that did it.
========================
Radun (11:33:01) :
Greylar (07:22:34) :
It is official! The “Solar Minimum Has Arrived”
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/06mar_solarminimum
An old article
I thought he was being ironic 🙂
And now I might know why there is a lag in time of the observed and adjusted 10.7 cm flux as regards to the baseline. The background should be highest at perihelion and lowest at appehelion. But the compensation at Penticon is November to February for mountains that get in the way:
“Three flux determinations are made each day. Between March and October measurements are made at 1700, 2000 (local noon) and 2300UT. However, the combination of location in a mountain valley and a relatively high latitude make it impossible to maintain these times during the rest of the year. Consequently, from November through February, the flux determination times are changed to 1800, 2000 and 2200, so that the Sun is high enough above the horizon for a good measurement to be made.”
When the observatory switches from 1800 hrs to 1700 hrs on March 1st, we should see a drop in our near background readings of F10.7. Observing an hour earlier in the morning when the moisture content of the atmosphere is highest. Observing an hour later in the afternoon the moisture content of the atmosphere is likely not to vary as much.
This is all your fault, Anthony, you teach me to dig away at the sources of our data.
Archonix wrote:
The interesting thing is that introducing an outside force to this system will only have a temporary effect.
This is true if the outside force is constant or otherwise out of sync with the oscillator. If the outside force is itself an oscillator with a frequency close to the frequency of the system, the amplification can be huge. “Tacoma Narrows” is a classic example.
The relevance to climate is that we have climate oscillators with frequencies that are close to the frequencies of sunspot cycles.
“I thought he was being ironic :)”
Pierre asked to be brought up to speed on when 24 should have started. Greylar beat my search handily. Good show.
I thought the first NASA spew started July 31, 2006 with a speck of appropriate orientation that lasted some hours.
The emcee was our Hathaway, the first forecast I remember was his for Dec. 2006. An ‘official’ forecast of Jan. 2007 was the earliest I remember.