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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“Lee Kington (15:24:49) :
And of course the actual study will be published in Nature tomorrow.”
Funny! Made me laugh!
Neil O’Rourke (16:07:45) :
Hi Leif,
I’m looking at your F10.7 graph, and it seems to me that you’ve simply taken the data and used Excel to generate a parabolic trend curve.
Dear Neil,
Leif is right… Quadratic and cubic trends give a similar parabolic trend curve. Parabolic trend is also shown by quadratic and cubic trends on 1900-2000 Svalgaard’s database.
Argh! It should have said: “Quadratic and cubic polynomial trends…” Sorry 🙂
Here the data for 11 Jan 2008 to 12 Dec 2008:
http://lasp.colorado.edu/cgi-bin/ion-p?ION__E1=PLOT%3Aplot_tsi_data.ion&ION__E2=PRINT%3Aprint_tsi_data.ion&ION__E3=BOTH%3Aplot_and_print_tsi_data.ion&START_DATE=2008%2F011-00%3A00%3A00&STOP_DATE=2008%2F3112+00%3A00%3A00&TIME_SPAN=24&PRINT=Output+Data+as+Text
The parabolic line changes at Quintic and Hexic Polynomial Trends. The line is interesting at quartic polynomial trend.
Snow also on the Hamilton Range this AM. Every peak from Mt. Day on south had it.
Just Want Truth… (16:59:13) :
nice link hopefully eric will follow.
Okay. I fricken give up. It is the Sun and the fact that I get up every morning at 5:30 AM (some kind of damned internal clock I cannot shut off) every single morning since I was 4 years old. Given this correlation, I cause the Sun to rise. Therefore I cause the Sun to cycle between cold Earth and warm Earth. I will be setting up a website for sacrifices. My suggestion is that you donate once per month. Or else the Sun will stay asleep and you will all die. Do not think it is Mother Earth. Do not study the oceans. Look only at the Sun and lack of sunspots. If you do not donate enough, I will not bring sunspots back, and the Earth will not warm.
” I will be setting up a website for sacrifices.”
Goats or virgins?
Pamela Gray (17:46:18):
Um… Accept credit cards? 🙂
We live in Sunnyvale for years–I remember snow (or ice, actually) being a problem on Umunum and north to Montebello Ridge, maybe as far as SLAC once.
I only remember the other side (Diablo to Hamilton) a few time–Hamilton more that Diablo.
I’m not sure I see the warming tend here.
Anyone know why the images of the sun we see are coloured orange?
The sun is not orange. It is not yellow. It is white. Sunlight is the very definition of white.
REPLY: I’ve wondered that myself, and I have two possible answers:
1) It was an arbitrary choice, as colors often are, that looked “nice”. For example:
http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/weather/icons/1.GIF
2) The Florida Orange Growers Association lobbied NASA heavily to make it this way to promote their brand.
Maybe Leif has a third option.
– Anthony
Oh mighty Goddess Pamela, would a few Aussie politicians be an adequate sacrifice? They only have one eye each and that one is biased but I’m sure they’ll be happy to make the sacrifice for Gaia 😉
braddles (18:37:27) :
Anyone know why the images of the sun we see are coloured orange?
The sun is not orange. It is not yellow. It is white. Sunlight is the very definition of white.
I don’t know why the images of the Sun were colored orange. I remember from my Elementary School books the Sun was colored light hay yellow and sunbeams were slightly orange.
We can see suns in red at NASA website.
SteveSadlov (17:39:04) :
Larry Sheldon (18:28:06) :
I saw the snow on top of the Hamilton Range this morning too as I was on 680 near Pleasanton.
Reference for WUWT readers—Lick Observatory is in the Hamilton Range.
Leif at 15:32:00.
Thanks for the info about the plages not becoming spots. I was not precise in my language about the radio flux not rising. It seems to me that it is rising slightly in line with the slight rise in spots, but what I’d expect if the sunspots are becoming invisible is for the flux to rise but the number of spots to not rise.
Soon, though, we may be able to directly test the hypothesis that the dearth of spots during the the previous Grand Minima contributed to the cold then, or whether it was volcanoes that cooled the earth. Heh, unless we get no spots AND volcanoes.
========================================
“Pamela Gray (17:46:18) :
Okay. I fricken give up. It is the Sun and the fact that I get up every morning at 5:30 AM (some kind of damned internal clock I cannot shut off) ”
Try melatonin. hehe 😉
TerryBixler (16:29:04) :
eric (14:44:56) :
GCRs, think Svensmark.
Terry,
If you are referring to the hypothesis that cosmic rays influence cloud formation, there is little evidence to back it up. There has been no systematic trend in cosmic rays observed, only a cyclical one. In addition satellite observations of cosmic rays and cloud formation has not found any correlation.
It was a creative idea that has not panned out.
Joe, changes in Antarctic sea ice and ice sheet extent are pretty much unconnected and operate over different scales.
Sea ice extent reflects current climate and perhaps 3 or 4 prior years.
Ice sheet extent reflects the climate over a century to a few millenia.
<Pamela Gray wrote: “Do not study the oceans. Look only at the Sun and lack of sunspots.”
WRONG answer. Look at BOTH.
As in many cases, the answer is NOT just one or the other, it is somewhere in between…or both.
The oceans are the primary driver, the sun the second.
No need to mutually exclude the one from another when they both “force” Earth’s climate to behave to their wishes.
And no need to give up. Just look at the big BIG picture.
Chris
Norfolk, VA
Anyone out there know of an institution that has measured solar white-light faculae from 2007 to present? I might have a way to try and predict ramp, but I would need the facular measurements, if they exist.
Just when you think something is useless, up pops a need.
showing a large quantity of melted water going down a very deep hole in the ice.
Showing conclusively that snow melts in summer.
But is the ice mantle on Greenland any different from other areas in that part of the world?
Greenland is a mini Antarctica in the NH. I’d expect more glacier retreat than Antarctica because of the NH warming and air born particles (soot) over the last few decades. Whereas the SH hasn’t warmed.
Otherwise, as I mentioned for Antarctica, we don’t have enough data to tell us whether Greenland glaciers have advanced or retreated over the last century or two.
BTW, the paleo studies say the Greenland climate over the last 1,000 years to few K years has been characterised by ‘extreme’ variability probably due to ocean currents being the main determinant of North Atlantic climate.
So even if we did have a clear picture of Greenland ice sheet changes, which we don’t, they may have been caused by the ‘global’ climate or effects local to the North Atlantic.
http://hol.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/3/381
The scientific studies and discussions about all the different measurements of the direct and indirect indexes of the sun is very educational; however, the seemingly chaotic/stochastic behavior of the sun is such that the sun may never replicate its behavior to such a degree to make accurate predictions of its future activity and associated climatologically effects on earth though such attempts are admirable and at times may provide planning for a range of possible future climate changes.
So now we’ve gone from an Earth-centric model
to a helio-centric model
to a Pamela-centric model.
🙂
Comment on savethesharks (19:51:51)
Chris, I think you may have ‘misinterpreted’ Pamela’s post.
[Hint: research funding politics]
eric (19:30:04) where can we get longterm cloud coverage data?