By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM
The sun remains in a deep slumber.
Today we are 15 days into April without a sunspot and with 603 sunspotless day this cycle minimum, 92 already this year. 2009 at this rate, is likely to enter the top 10 years the last century along with 2007 (9th) and 2008 (2nd) this summer.
If it stays quiet the rest of this month, the minimum can be no earlier than November 2008, at least a 12.5 year cycle length. I believe January 2009 is a better shot to be the solar minimum as sunspot number would have to be below 0.5 in June 2008 to prevent the running mean (13 month) from blipping up then. April needs only to stay below 3.2 and May 3.4 to get us to January. This would be very like cycles 1 to 4 in the late 1700s and early 1800s, preceding the Dalton Minimum. That was a cold era, the age of Dickens and the children playing in the snow in London, much like this past winter.
THE ARCTIC AND ANTARCTIC ICE STORY
As for the ice, we hear in the media the hype about the arctic and Antarctic ice. The arctic ice we are told is more first and second year ice and very vulnerable to a summer melt.
Actually the arctic ice is very 3rd highest level since 2002, very close to 2003, in a virtual tie to last winter and the highest year according to IARC-JAXA. The anomaly is a relatively small 300,000 square km according to The Cryosphere Today.
There was much attention paid in the media to the crack in the Wilkins Ice sheet bridge. It was not even reflected as a blip on the Southern Hemisphere ice extent, which has grown rapidly as the southern hemisphere winter set in to 1,150,000 square kms above the normal for this date and rising rapidly.
The net GLOBAL sea ice anomaly is also positive, 850,000 square km above the normal. See full PDF here.
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Leif Svalgaard (11:59:51)
“I’m lost as to the meaning of the above statement.”
–
As you said:
“There is a slight semantic difficulty […]”
…and a diversion into verbose exposition will not be constructive (at this juncture).
– –
Leif: “We are talking about several gigabytes of data…”
–
As indicated above, my preference is monthly summaries – by latitude.
I realize that – as yet – such a webpage may not exist.
– –
Leif Svalgaard (12:09:09)
“What would you do with the data if you had it?”
Again, I’m not looking (at this juncture) to venture into a verbose exchange.
At this stage I am – firstly – probing the extent of data-access obstacles.
For precursory data exploration (e.g. time/space-integrated cross-correlation, cross-wavelet phase-difference, & cross-recurrence analyses) it would be great if there was a simple webpage with the following columns:
Year Month (-90,-85) (-85,-80) … (-5,0) (0,5) … (85,90)
The units could be nHz – or more intuitively: average instant synodic (with Earth) rotation period in days.
I suspect that narrower latitudinal-bands might be necessary to isolate some of the gradients of most interest.
The spatiotemporal-integration algorithms I employ (generally) alert me (via acoustics) of any (serious) need to work with other resolutions. Monthly resolution is good for preliminary investigations (since it provides ‘just enough’ info on seasonal variation).
It would be speculative to attempt to answer your question more specifically without first being empowered (by the responsible authorities) to perform a precursory examination of a sensible summary of the (preferably well-formatted) data.
But as I say:
I realize that – as yet – such a webpage may not exist.
(And if this is the case, there are other investigative methods that will be sensible choices, given the constraints on the problem.)
– – – – – – –
anna v (13:18:59)
“It is criminal if it is used to plunge the world into an irreversible energy strangulation adventure […]”
–
Worse than that – if one thinks a few moves ahead to where that could lead.
…but: the destabilizing forces are coming into check.
Leif Svalgaard (15:16:00) :
Sorry Mark, I just used your post as a convenient ‘linking element’ to put the issue in context, not to imply anything about your personal stance on this.
Thanks, Leif. That’s what I thought, and I was having issues getting a post through so the same things got said more than once which was not intended.
and about the ‘faint Sun paradox’: we need a way of accounting for the Earth having liquid water at a time when the Sun’s output was 30-35% lower than today. The ‘traditional’ explanation is a high CO2 concentration. I think the pressure back then was not so much higher that the PV=nRT explanation would do the trick. In any case if one wants to claim that CO2 had nothing to do with it, that someone would have to come up with a plausible mechanism, and don’t know if that has been done [I don’t think so, but …]
Well, I’ve never actually assumed PV = nRT as a cause per se, just that the relationship will hold for any homgeneous volume of a gas. In other words, slice out a 1 m^3 volume of our atmosphere, or even Venus’, and you’ll find the relationship holds pretty well. If CO2 is absorbing enough energy, then it will show up in that equation (though I don’t know how to do it with a mixture of gases – partial pressure of each gas, I think). What, however, happens when there’s simply so much of any gas, and enough gravity to condense it as happened on Venus?
Mark
Leif, Thank you for imparting your knowledge in a very calm and informative way – I am truly impressed!
A satellite which holds promise for future measurements of GHGs and their effects:
For interest some preliminary results referenced below
http://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/en/imgdata/topics/2009/tp090319
http://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/en/imgdata/topics/2009/img/tp090319_01e.png
http://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/en/imgdata/topics/2009/img/tp090319_02e.png
http://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/en/imgdata/topics/2009/img/tp090210_03e.jpg
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
bill (18:09:32) :
A satellite which holds promise for future measurements of GHGs and their effects:
Yes, it will be most interesting to see what they measure, once they get the systems checked out.
[Ron de Haan (13:31:43)]
Excellent post!
Ron de Haan (13:31:43) :
If you are still a believer of AGW, your in a minority situation now: See latest WUWT posting, Only 43% of US citizens believe in AGW.
that is 34% …
Mike Bryant (19:16:15) :
Incandescent or CFL?
This is a well-organized & succinct paper:
E. Echer & L. Svalgaard (2004). Asymmetry in the Rosenberg-Coleman effect around solar minimum revealed by wavelet analysis of the interplanetary magnetic field polarity data (1927–2002). Geophysical Research Letters 31, L12808.
http://www.leif.org/research/Asymmetric%20Rosenberg-Coleman%20Effect.pdf
Thanks for drawing my attention to this Leif.
If I was teaching a course I would put this on the reading list.
Question:
What was the temporal resolution of the series that was submitted to the Morlet wavelet algorithm?
– – – –
Mike Bryant (19:16:15)
“How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”
(?) – waiting in suspense for a clever answer…. .. …
How about… two if the light bulb is big enough…
Paul Vaughan (12:50:21) :
What was the temporal resolution of the series that was submitted to the Morlet wavelet algorithm?
One day. The series is here: http://www.leif.org/research/spolar.txt
Paul Vaughan (12:50:21) :
Mike Bryant (19:16:15)
“How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”
(?) – waiting in suspense for a clever answer…. .. …
Do they even know where to screw it in?
Leif Svalgaard (15:36:26)
“One day. The series is here: […]”
Thanks for the link – I’m always pleased to see data publicly available.
Which HMF sector definition did you use?
(a) plane division
– i.e. T sector defined by: Bx > By
and A sector defined by: Bx 0 & By < 0
and A sector defined by: Bx 0
(c) other
The html-editor garbled Paul Vaughan (16:43:10) due to the “less than” & “greater than” symbols. Restated with words:
Which HMF sector definition did you use?
(a) plane division
– i.e. T sector defined by: Bx greater than By
and A sector defined by: Bx less than By
(b) quadrant division
– i.e. T sector defined by: Bx greater than 0 & By less than 0
and A sector defined by: Bx less than 0 & By greater than 0
(c) other
Paul Vaughan (16:46:21) :
Which HMF sector definition did you use?
The HMF polarity is a large-scale property of the field, and a sector may persist for a week or more even if Bx and By drift a bit back and forth. What is characteristic of the structure is the abrupt polarity change as you can see clearly here http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ace/MAG_SWEPAM_7d.html in the latter part of the 16th. So, a combination of eyeballing, computer algorithm, and sometimes pure 27-day recurrence are using to ‘gauge’ the polarity, Like the sunspot count this is somewhat subjective, but nevertheless repeatable [and by several people].
Two… one to screw it in and one to screw it up…
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”
No one knows because they won’t release the dataset or the software code.
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”
6,034, They have to have a meeting in Bali to discuss it first.
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
One, if he has a grant.
Svalgaard & Wilcox 1975: “The observation that the westward mode exists during the first half of the sunspot cycle and the eastward mode during the second half should be investigated within the framework of this theory.”
Has there since been a ‘final say’ on this matter? [Related landmark &/or recent-consensus-view paper links will be appreciated.]
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Twenty-five:
One to write the light bulb removal program,
One to write the light bulb insertion program,
One to hide both programs,
Four to peer review the work,
Seventeen to publish articles confirming work, and
One to call anyone who questions the work a snip.
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
At the present point in time it is against policy and the best interests of science to divulge information of such a statistical nature. Next question, please.
And finally… drum roll please…
Q: How many believable, competent, “just-right-for-the-job” presidential candidates does it take to change a light bulb?
A: It’s going to be a dark 4 years, isn’t it?
Paul Vaughan (17:47:27) :
as there since been a ‘final say’ on this matter? [Related landmark &/or recent-consensus-view paper links will be appreciated.]
no, this is pretty much speculation.
Leif,
I see the note about 5-day time-integration in Svalgaard & Wilcox (1975) – but I want to verify that the same 1-day-resolution time-series was used (minus a few years, of course).
I see the ~28.5 day signal in a few panels of the Br(-1)^N column of Neugebauer et al’s (2000) Figure 6, but they don’t give it much special mention. I’m wondering if there are any good works on the intermittent 28.5 day pattern?