Sol has been without a cycle 24 spot since January 13th. Today the spotless streak was broken with this high latitude and correct polarity spot. The current sunspot number is now at 12 according to SWPC.
The SOHO Magnetogram image below shows how the North-South polarity is oriented:
The real question is: how long will it last? Most of the cycle 24 spots we’ve seen so far have very short lifetimes, winking out in a day or two.
@Ian Holton (18:26:24)
“In the Maun Min how many of these latest half day or single day or so “sunspecs” actually happened…many maybe, that were not counted, who knows.”
I’m only guessing, but based on the artwork from some texts I’ve seen from back then (you had to go to libraries to see that stuff, and it was disappearing fast as it was replaced with more “modern” “improved” material.), …in any case, the artwork is pretty impressive, …awesome attention to detail. Their powers of observation were highly developed. If their telescopes were good enough to resolve the spots, I have no doubt that they recorded them.
Thanks for that Leif… will read later when I have a bit more spare time.
There are of course other methods to change the TSI…of which we have very limited records anyway!
eg. “What caused the swings during the last glacial age are not known for sure. They were probably fuelled by natural shifts in Earth’s orbit and axis, which can have big consequences in the amount of heat we get from the Sun.”(quote from a new article)
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gjCsnXjk_kGA9i6mXWJ-iJBiGflA
Ben (08:56:09) :
For Leif or other observers of Old Sol –
If the RC Theory and the SSRC are not on the mark, then please help to clarify the impacts of the various solar changes on climate, if you would please.
What if any current theories are more mainstream, which tie Climate Change to Solar Events? Are there a handful of major Solar-Climate Change theories for which data is being collected and analyzed?
Are there credible theories which predict a coming cooler climate,
based upon theories or events not tied to CO2?
Are the theories tied to specific solar changes or to other specific changes outside of our solar system?
I recommend reading Svensmark’s The Chilling Star. I’m not quite clear why Lief refers to this work as “fringe.” Perhaps, like so many theories that eventually became “mainstream,” it still is. But as a reasonably intelligent layman I found the science lucid and plausible, not to mention consistent with the last few years of climate developments
Psi (19:38:23) :
I recommend reading Svensmark’s The Chilling Star. I’m not quite clear why Leif refers to this work as “fringe.”
For once because he refers [page 224 bottom] to me as being Swedish 🙂 . More seriously, the book has lots of useful general- purpose information. As for the meaning of ‘fringe’, Wikipedia has this definition:
“We use the term fringe theory in a very broad sense to describe ideas that depart significantly from the prevailing or mainstream view in its particular field of study. Examples include conspiracy theories, ideas which purport to be scientific theories but have not gained scientific consensus, esoteric claims about medicine, novel re-interpretations of history and so forth. Some of the theories addressed here may in a stricter sense be hypotheses, conjectures, or speculations.”
The only way to ‘reconcile’ the previous records to modern is to reduce the modern to previous.
You can parallel the two records if you like, but you cannot reliably raise the historic records up for lack of instrumentation at those times.
Mainly, there is no way to prove one way or another that sunspecks did or did not exist in the Maunder or the Dalton. And unless there is drawing evidence and notes to show that the contrast that L&P are proving out has happened before, the error incurred in raising up the historic data will be too great.
A good example of two data sets is the tree ring in N. America from 1700 to present and the Instrumental Record from 1895 to present. You can view the two simulanteously and see just how much individual years can be spot and and the next way off the mark.
There is no way to tell the difference between lack of consistency and actual outlier values in the historic sunspot records. i.e. – the unknown is whether the Sun was more erratic or the maker of the observations, or both.
What happens 2 to 20 years from now the Sun starts putting out erratic spots?
This is a wait & see.
My deepest regret is that Galileo and modern instrumentation did not come soon enough.
Robert Bateman (20:22:25) :
but you cannot reliably raise the historic records up for lack of instrumentation at those times. Mainly, there is no way to prove one way or another that sunspecks did or did not exist in the Maunder or the Dalton.
The Maunder is tough but from 1720s on it is possible. Robert, you have clearly not read or not understood my talk. It is possible to calibrate the old records correctly. The argument goes like this: solar activity is the source of X-ray and UV radiation, which in turn creates and maintains the ionosphere. Solar heating and tides move the ionosphere across the Earth magnetic field lines thereby creating a current whose magnetic deflection we can measure reliably [it is an angle, so has no calibration issues] on the ground. This effect was discovered in 1722, and we have measurements from then, from the 1740s, 1760s, 1781-present, so can calibrate the reported sunspot number. Zero sunspot number at minimum gives a deflection of 5 arc minutes [because the Sun is still radiating some UV and X-rays] while a sunspot number of 100 [in modern terms] give a deflection of 10 arc minutes. Even with instruments of 250 years ago, 5-10 arc minutes could easily and correctly be measured. Using such data, we can, in fact, show that the old records need to be increased and we can say by how much. The surprise is that when that is done, it turns out that the 18th and 19th centuries were not particularly less active than the 20th.
Robert Bateman (20:35:04) :
There is no way to tell the difference between lack of consistency and actual outlier values in the historic sunspot records
Yes there is, see previous post.
Your comment reminds me of the French philosopher Auguste Comte [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Comte ] who was asked once to name a problem that man could NEVER solve. He chose as that unanswerable question “what is the chemical composition of the stars”? That same year Kirschhoff discovered spectral analysis and proved Comte dead-wrong.
We CAN get a handle on this and it is being done.
I don’t know who these people are, or where they got their information…
http://www.cora.nwra.com/~werne/eos/text/maunder.html
….but they make the following assertion…
“At first people claimed that the main reason for the lack of sunspots during the Maunder minimum was due to the fact that astronomers were not observing the Sun during this time or at least not very systematically. However, this is not the case. Several people, namely:
1. The polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius (1611-1687).He also compiled one of the earliest detailed maps of the moon.
2. Jean Picard (1620-1682), a French astronomer. He was the first to measure the size of the earth accurately.
3. The English astronomer John Flamsteed (1646-1719). He was the first astronomer royal in England and founded the Greenwich Observatory in London.
counted the number of sunspots systematically during that time. They only recorded about 50 sunspots, whereas in any typical 30-year interval during the past hundred years there have been between 40,000 and 50,000 sunspots.”
It would be interesting to reconstruct the data, if it’s available, to see if it supports those claims or not.
Leif: The problem lies in interpolation when going from high resolution to low.
If you can demonstrate that the modern (say SC23) cycle can be converted from today’s methods to grouping without altering the overall high resolution of the cycle shape, that’s one point.
But when I look at your paper and see that the older cycles are radically altered not only in magnitude, but also in overall shape, therein lies a problem.
I agree that the work needs to be done, but not at the cost of radically altering what was observed. You cannot go back in time to retake the data, anymore than the AGW’ers went and remodeled the Antarctic temperature set.
I can believe the modern data set dumbed down for comparison to the historic data (obviously in 2 to 3 distinct sets), but I cannot believe that interpolation can sucessfully modernize the historical data without distorting it.
I do highly reccomend you get aquainted with someone who works with Astro Imaging (Caltech or STScI) to help you along with avoiding the pitfalls of image
(data) restoration techniques.
And vice versa. The loss is far greater when going from low resolution to high.
Many years of work went into techniques such as Lucy-Richardson, Swarp, Maximum Entropy, Drizzling, etc., and they all have thier drawbacks.
There is no substitute in reality for actual resolution, but it can help to interpolate as long as you understand it’s not the real thing.
HasItBeen4YearsYet? (22:08:29)
The Sporer Minimum was during the time of the great MegaDrought in Dorado (Mexico, desert SW).
The Wolf Minimum saw the great famine in Europe as the climate increasingly turned wet during the summer, rotting the crops in the fields.
Robert Bateman (22:48:32) :
I cannot believe that interpolation can sucessfully modernize the historical data without distorting it.
It is not interpolation. It is much more straightforward. Take this example: Astronomer AA counts NA spots or groups or marks or whatever on the sun with what ever resolution he has while magnetician MA measures the magnetic deflection to be D all in year YA. Astronomer AB counts NB spots or groups or marks or whatever on the sun with what ever resolution he has while magnetician MB measures the magnetic deflection to be D all in year YB. Since the deflection is the same, the ionosphere has the same conductivity, so the X-ray and UV flux was the same and hence also solar activity, so that NA/NB is the conversion factor beween AA and AB no matter what their instruments and resolutions were. If one now has several years of this ratio between the two astronomers, then it is possible to calibrate one to the scale of the other, even if there is no overlap in time between them. This is absolutely fool proof, after one has corrected for several well-understood small, second order effects [like the Earth’s magnetic field itself changing slightly with time].
This can be taken out of the realm of ‘belief’ [“I cannot believe…”] and converted to hard, cold science, that does not depend on beliefs anymore.
Robert Bateman (22:55:24) :
I do highly reccomend you get aquainted with someone who works with Astro Imaging (Caltech or STScI) to help you along with avoiding the pitfalls of image (data) restoration techniques.
Not needed as there is no image restoration involved.
HasItBeen4YearsYet? (22:08:29) :
It would be interesting to reconstruct the data, if it’s available, to see if it supports those claims or not.
The Maunder minimum is not yet what we are working on. this project moves in smaller steps. First we show that 18th, 19th, and 20th century had comparable activity, then we try to understand what made Maunder so special. We know that the cosmic ray modulation was almost as strong as today, so the magnetic cycle was working then as now, so solar activity was not down by a factor of 1000. One possibility is that Livingston and Penn are correct that sunspots were there, but invisible. And there is still the issue of wrong interpretation of the reported sunspot data. E.g. there are many cases where an astronomer would say: it is some years ago that I last saw a spot, and that being recorded as a number of years of 365 days with zero spots, which is silly.
But one thing at a time.
Leif: I did not mean to imply that you were restoring images, but that you are attempting to restore data taken well over a hundred or more years ago, to a level of resolution that it was not taken under.
Doing so will place artifacts in your restoration, and that is simply unavoidable. The degree to which you interpolate, and the means by which you interpolate (formula) directly results in distortion of the data (image).
To what degree you introduce artifacting has a great bearing on the outcome.
The process is the same. A digital image is composed of data points, irregarless of the source. So is the data recorded by organic camera (eye) and interpreted by the organic computer (brain) and transferred to medium (paper) and ravaged by time (decompostion).
Space Science regularly deconvolves thier images to get the most out of them. Even Hubble’s fine images are deconvovled.
Your task, given the sparseness of the old data, can only be taken so far.
There are limits to image and data restoration techniques.
You really do need to consult an Image Processing specialist, it can only help you.
Waw! For some reason the sunspot made it… one more day. But it is clearly fading away rapidly.
On the other hand, there seems to be a big bubble of activity on the souther hemisphere coming our way:
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/eit_284/1024/latest.jpg
I’m not quite sure it’s a spot however…
Flanagan (00:33:13) :
Waw! For some reason the sunspot made it… one more day. But it is clearly fading away rapidly.
As I am quite sure that the Hubble Space Telescope could see Halley’s Comet long before ground based did and a lot longer afterwards, simply because it has no atmosphere to contend with.
So, how much more powerful is the SOHO instumentation that allows it to ‘observere’ spots that mere mortals on Earth could never hope to spot?
Many times.
And that’s without ever having to bother with basic image calibration.
Darks & Flats, bad pixel maps? What’s that?
Leif, why do you mistrust past sunspot data, I am sure those scientist were as equally dedicated to ensuring their data was totally accurate as you obviously are. I feel you have no reason to mistrust that past data. If no sunspots were logged there were obviously NO sunspots, the procedure is simple you either see them or you don`t.
The number of sunspots or lack of them appear to correlate well with the past warmings and coolings, this may in itself not be the cause of the cooling but just part of a process you do not understand.
Robert Bateman (23:57:08) :
Doing so will place artifacts in your restoration, and that is simply unavoidable. The degree to which you interpolate, and the means by which you interpolate (formula) directly results in distortion of the data (image).
Why is this so hard? There are no images involved, and no interpolation. The resolution, the seeing, the instrument, and the observers are completely irrelevant. I gave a generalized example using symbols [NA, MB, etc]. Apparently that did not register. Let me try again. Heinrich Schwabe who discovered the sunspot cycle tells us that in 1837 he observed 182 ‘groups’ in 200 days of observations [for a yearly count of 182*365/200 = 333 groups]. We don’t know what his resolution was, how he counted groups or spots or specks. We do know that Gauss had determined that in 1837 the diurnal variation of the magnetic needle was 12 minutes of arc. We also know that in 1990, the magnetic needle varied 12 minutes as well. We therefore know that solar activity in 1837 was the same as in 1990 and that the 333 Schwabe ‘groups’ correspond to the 143 ‘Groups’ modern instruments showed. Therefore we can convert Schwabe’s observations to modern equivalents without any image restoration issues.
Rob (06:20:30) :
why do you mistrust past sunspot data
I certainly do not. I use them daily to great effect.
The issue is that different observers use different telescopes, have different eyesight, count little and big spots differently, etc., and we need to bring all observers ‘on the same page’. It is like this: you discover an old journal where someone had measured the temperature every day for fifty years. This is clearly valuable data and you do not mistrust the data collected with so much care, but the journal does not tell what temperature scale was used, Celsius, Fahrenheit, Reamur, or perhaps some homegrown scale [this is a very old journal]. So how do you find out? You look for other things to compare with; perhaps the journal said somewhere that the temperature one morning was 140 [in what units you don’t know] and that there was frost on the window, so now you have a clue that can help you fix the scale. Similar thing with the sunspots. We need to know that when observer X says x spots what that count would have been for a modern observer. Once we figure that out, we can use the old data with confidence and trust them. Before we have figured that out, WE CANNOT. Simple as that.
Leif : Why is this so hard? There are no images involved
You still don’t get it, and you still need help in that regards.
Digital data and Digitial Images are one and the same thing when it gets down to individual pixels. The difference is this: When you work with a Digital Image, and you have a higher resolution image to compare with, you can see before your very eyes just how badly you can mangle the output from a restoration process of an image (data points) that was taken under inferior resolution. This image (and data) restoration process science is at least 2 decades old, and that is how far behind you are.
Still need convincing?
Take SC23, convert it to groups, then restore it using your methods.
Try it again, inserting blank areas, randomly generated, where no data was taken due to cloudy conditions.
Try this several times.
Show your results. You won’t need scientific analysis to demonstrate the artifacting, you’ll see it the same way Imaging Processes show it.
Flanagan (00:33:13) :
Waw! For some reason the sunspot made it… one more day. But it is clearly fading away rapidly.
Catania { http://www.ct.astro.it/sun/ } didn’t record it for today, however, it can just been seen in SOHO — if you know where to look. It’s such a sad looking spot — an SP (stuck pixel) is more impressive.
Robert Bateman (09:55:47) :
Take SC23, convert it to groups, then restore it using your methods. Try it again, inserting blank areas, randomly generated, where no data was taken due to cloudy conditions. Try this several times. Show your results. You won’t need scientific analysis to demonstrate the artifacting, you’ll see it the same way Imaging Processes show it.
This has been done many times over the past 150 years by many people. Makes no difference, just adds a bit of random noise. Has nothing to do with images or pixels or resolution. I can do it for you, if you insist [or you can do it yourself – people often see better what they do themselves], but the process does not change the count [except adding random noise] and you can’t tell the resulting [synthetic] solar cycle from the real one. That is: If I generated 10 [or any other number] artificial cycles and put the real one in among the synthetic ones, you couldn’t tell me which one is the real one.
Has been done many times. Is one of the standard ways of judging what the ‘error bar’ on the counts is. Today, there is no missing data, but back in 1780 there was, so what is the error bar on the 1780 count? Doing the synthetic cycles gives you a handle on that [use the missing days as a mask on a modern cycle and see how it changes – the result is: very little – the reason is very clear: a solar cycle contains only 20 truly independent data points].
Bottom line: no images, no pixels, no restoration issues.
Read your paper Leif.
Good attempt here, helpful, but there are a few too many assumptions to give an accurate number of the past data imo anyway. The error bars would be large due to the many assumptions, again imo, but helpful paper anyway. Not sure that all would be convinced of any single attempt on the past series, maybe a mean of all the decent attempts is helpful.
Leif Svalgaard (22:30:18) :
Robert Bateman (21:59:52
http://issuepedia.org/Global_warming_denial
This web. seams to be PRO MMGW.
so no supprize here.