Guest post by Guillermo Gonzalez
I recently happened upon the SORCE/TIM website and decided to look up the plot of the full total solar irradiance (TSI) dataset (http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/data/tsi_data.htm#plots)
The SORCE mission began collecting TSI data in February 2003.
I was curious to see if the variations in the TSI had begun to rise yet, perhaps indicating a start to cycle 24. Visual inspection of the SORCE TSI plot showed just the opposite – variations continue to decline in amplitude. If cycle 24 has started, there are no signs of it in these data.
We can be a bit more quantitative if we examine, instead, a plot of TSI variance with time. I produced such a plot using the daily average TSI data provided on the SORCE web site.
The red data are variance values calculated at two-week intervals. The blue curve is the smoothed data calculated in the same way as smoothed sunspot numbers (basically a 12-month running average). Note, the vertical axis is plotted on a logarithmic scale.
To compare the recent TSI variance trend with the previous sunspot minimum, I looked up the ACRIM2 daily average TSI data at: http://www.acrim.com/Data%20Products.htm
These data are plotted on the same scale as the SORCE data. The smoothed data show a minimum TSI variance near the beginning of 1996, some months before sunspot minimum (October 1996). Notice that the minimum value for the variance during the 1996 minimum was about an order of magnitude larger than the present TSI variance.
The SORCE web site quotes long-term 1-sigma precision (relative accuracy) of their TSI measurements to be 0.001%/yr. This corresponds to a variance of 2 ´ 10-4 W2 m-4. However, the precision should be considerably better than this on the 2-week timescale that I selected for calculating the variance. Unfortunately, I have not been able to locate a quote for the estimated precision of the ACRIM2 measurements. It would be worthwhile to know if the minimum TSI variance of the previous sunspot minimum measured by ACRIM2needs to be corrected for the instrumental precision.
Guillermo Gonzalez writes on his background:
I’m an astronomer, though my present title is associate professor of physics at Grove City College, PA. I wrote a paper (in Solar Physics) with Ken Schatten back in 1987 on predicting the next solar maximum with geomagnetic indices. That was my only contribution on anything having to do with the Sun-Earth connection, but I also got a letter published in Physics Today in 1997 wherein I urged readers to takethe Sun-Earth climate connection more seriously.
These days most of my research is on extrasolar planets.
UPDATE: I received a suggestion for an overlay via email from Terry Dunleavy and I’ve worked one up below. This was done graphically. I took great care to get the two lined up correctly. Note however that the datasets span different lengths of time, as you can note on the two timescales I’ve included on the combined graph. The vertical scale matches exactly between graphs though. – Anthony
UPDATE2: Here is another graphical comparison of the two TSI variance graphs, scaled to have a matching X-axis and appropriately aligned side by side. – Anthony
Along the lines of my previous comment, it is worth looking at some of the recent papers by K.-K. Tung et al: http://www.amath.washington.edu/people/faculty/tung/publications.html (e.g., “Constraining Model Transient Climate Response using Independent Observations of Solar-Cycle Forcing and Response” or “Solar Cycle Warming at the Earth’s Surface in NCEP and ERA-40 data: A linear Discriminant Analysis”. It is also worth reading what Hansen et al at GISTEMP have to say about solar irradiance in their 2008 climate summary: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/
Although this project just started, we should get some good data from CLARREO in a few years. Goals may change based on how the instrumentation development proceeds but CLARREO may put the “total” back into TSI. We don’t currently measure all of the solar spectrum and make assumptions about certain wavelengths. It may also help determine if TSI is closer to 1361ish or 1366ish or 1371ish (or more). I think it’s hard to say that a climate model is working well if you don’t have an accurate measurement of TSI.
http://clarreo.larc.nasa.gov/about-science.html
kim says:
No? Looks like a pretty good match to me: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3039/2782192258_e2f6b5e758.jpg with a transient climate response (TCR) of ~2 K, which is right about at the center of the IPCC range for this parameter. Of course, this comes along with caveats regarding contributions from other forcings (e.g., both positive forcings from other greenhouse gases and negative forcings from aerosols) and other sources of climate variability that makes the actual determination of a TCR or equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) from the instrumental temperature record subject to quite large error bars. (Better estimates comes from paleoclimate events, such as the last glacial maximum, response to volcanic eruptions like Mt Pinatubo, and…best yet…combining all of these data together.)
Joel 18:25:59
We’ve seen that graph before; the only time there is a good match is for the last quarter of the last century. Before and after that time the match is poor, particularly just lately, and for the time before your graph starts. You are displaying confirmation bias by interpreting that graph to show a match between CO2 rise and temperature rise.
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Robert Wood (16:17:13) :
I agree with Jim. Temperature is surely most sensitive to the Earth’s albedo….. even in the Global Climate Models used by the warmenists.
How do they explain this remains static?
Maybe one of the Team can put me really to rights on this question.
That is probably the biggest fraud in the models. The generally accepted effect of a CO2 doubling just due to radiative forcing is only about 1 deg C, and this is with a lot of hand-waving. To “fit” the hockey stick observations, the modelers force unsubstantiated amplifiers into the models. The biggest one is the theory that as CO2 and temperature rise, clouds disappear so the albedo rises. I’m sure there are meteorologists who can easily disprove this theory based on temperature, humidity, and CO2 variations. I don’t think that the warmer tropics have significantly less cloud cover or that the high CO2 from autumn forested areas make clouds disappear.
Also, Joel, even if that graph had any validity, the 1.2K sensitivity line is a better match to the data, but then the 1.2K line suffers from an even greater mismatch before your graph begins. Nice try, even pretty slick, but it doesn’t say what you purport that it does.
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Looks like some of the downward spikes correlate to hurricanes. Can someone overlay a “storm” graph on the tsi graph? Just curious.
REPLY: Hurricanes in no way have any effect here. This data is measured from satellite in space, the dips are sunspots like the monster dual spots in October 2003 – Anthony
John Finn (17:25:56)
Hey, I have an idea, maybe its not the .05% change in TSI that is causing all of this climate panic. After all we understand this process completely. Nope it’s clear the problem is not the local variable star. It has got to be an infinitesimal increase in a trace gas that helps make life possible that will kill us all.
To stop this call now and for $199,999,500,000.00 we can bottle all of this nasty stuff and save the planet.
/sarc
Terry Jackson (18:06:37)
What happens in Alaska as far as winter temps directly affects both Canada and the US, as the cold Arctic air masses develop there and plunge south and west.
The first indication last fall was when the temps in Fairbanks plunged to -20F.
It got steadily worse as the season wore on. I would expect more of the same this year, and progress steadily towards an even colder winter.
Which is why I say time runs thin for AGW.
They must surely know it. With GCR’s a year behind solar activity, next winter’s shadow looms large.
Dead quiet solar activity hold little hope at that length of delay.
Joel Shore (18:00:34) :
Adam from Kansas says:
“TSI continues to drop, SST’s have peaked when the TSI was at the highest level in the last solar cycle and has dropped since, it also appears the SOI is now on a noticable upward trend (hit +10 today) since cycle 23 was winding down towards the minimum.
If these connections hold any weight, than the AGW house of cards really will be falling down.”
I don’t really see how your last statement follows from the rest. Whether or not the sun has enough of an effect on climate that climate varies detectably with the solar cycle does not really address the fundamental question of what has caused the general warming over the last 30+ years.
Um, maybe just maybe if the sun “has enough of an effect on climate” the high cycle of solar output over those 30 years caused the rising temps and now the dropping solar output is causing cooling. It’s how cause and effect works. You know, both ways…
In fact, as kim noted above, one of the reasons that Leif is skeptical of the solar connection is that it would seem to imply a high climate sensitivity.
The light slowly dawns….
God I love the smell of cognitive dissonance in the morning…
See, it’s like this, if the connection exists and if the high sensitivity it implies is real, then the world will be getting very very cold. It will take 20 years or so, but it will happen in a more or less direct trend. Most folks believe what they see, so while they saw slight warming for 30 years they were willing to let the AGW crowd run rampant. When they are seeing snow in places they haven’t seen in 30 years and crops are going in 2 weeks late and skiing runs an extra month, well, folks are just going to laugh their derrieres off when you try to sell them the Global Warming story.
That is why the second statement directly follows the premiss.
Now we don’t know what the mechanism might be, but when correlation runs both ways with very high temporal synchrony AND when the AGW thesis is not predicting (pardon me, projecting) anything with accuracy; it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know AGW is toast; all it takes is Joe and Jane Six Pack sitting on a too cold beach with loads of snow in the mountains too late in the season and at the poles (rather like we have happening now…)
So read it and weep. Old Sol is getting the last laugh. All it takes is waiting now (assuming the solar thesis is true, of course 😉
Now you may have 2 years to cram an agenda through, but you know, the voter is a fickle beast and ‘feeling had’ has a way of focusing folks. So I’d suggest considering just how much vengeance Joe and Jane are going to ask for when that moment comes. Overreaching usually leads to downfall…
“AHh, Vanity, my favorite sin” (The Devil’s Advocate)…
How can you have a ramping flux, but nothing else is happening?
I’m going to keep on guessing at this in a vacuum.
The flux is the voltage. The gauss of the spots & faculae are the amperage.
The voltage may rise in a cycle, but rise in isolation.
TSI, ain’t got no amperage, ain’t got no melody.
Today, the volume on the Solar Index was minimal. Shares traded at under $1, and papers were filed to request more time until deslisting occurs.
From the ACRIM website:
“Monitoring TSI variability is clearly an important component of climate change research, particularly in the context of understanding the relative forcings of natural and anthropogenic processes. The requirements for a long-term, climate TSI database can be inferred from a recent National Research Council study which concluded that gradual variations in solar luminosity of as little as 0.25 % was the likely forcing for the ‘little ice age’ that persisted in varying degree from the late 14th to the mid 19th centuries. A centuries-long TSI database will have to be calibrated by either precision or accuracy to a small fraction of this value to be of any use in assessing the magnitude of solar forcing. ”
(Emphasis added)
Good to know there are still some real scientists out there.
John Finn 17:25:56
Interesting that you ask how such a small deviation in TSI can have large climatic effects. That is the most important question, if, in fact, the sun directs the climate. We don’t know the answer and great prizes await those who figure it out.
John Finn,
I believe that the answer to your question is the Solar/Lunar Tides.
I am now convinced that the small variations in Solar insulation of
~ 0.1 % has an effect upon the world climate but that this effect is relatively
muted. In other words, I am asserting that if there is a mutiplicative
factor that amplifies the effects of the small changes in solar insulation,
it is not large.
The model I have develop argues that, on centennial time scales, the Earth’s climate is primarily driven by a combination of changes in the
Earth’s rotation rate and changes in the amplitudes of the lunar/solar tides.
This model asserts that the level of solar activity, the changes in the Earth’s rotation rate and the amplitudes of the solar/lunar tides are all driven by the same underlying mechanism.
I am arguing that the apparent synchronous variation between
the level of solar activity and the Earth’s average temperature is just that,
and APPRARENT synchronization. The two phenomenon just appear to
go up and down together. They are not strongly coupled.
Hence, my money is on the lunar/solar tides (and accompanying changes in the Earth’s rotation rate) as the link between level of solar activity and the Earth’s climate. These important linking factors negate the need to have a multiplicative factor to amplify the small changes in solar insolation.
[snip – website you reference (yours) has adult content, this violates our site policy]
Guillermo
Thanks for plotting the log of variance. That decline of about 1.5 orders of magnitude lower than the previous 1996 minimum appears to be a dramatic change.
The current cycle 23 is longer than the previous cycle 22.
Could there be a correlation of this decline in variance with the length of the cycle?
Note the decline in global temperature with increasing cycle length:
Reichel, R., P. Thejll, and K. Lassen (2001), The cause-and-effect relationship of solar cycle length and the Northern Hemisphere air surface temperature, J. Geophys. Res., 106(A8), 15,635–15,641.
This may lead to a correlation between the decline in variance with the decline in global temperature where both correlate with the length of the cycle.
Anthony – regarding norman hasty’s comment, he may have meant the opposite – could the Forbrush dropouts be triggering storms?
i.e. sudden reduction in TSI – gives a sudden reduction in heating – causing a spike in cooling temperature gradient. Could that trigger storms?
The first comment, Jim Arndt (16:01:21) , mentioned “ Penn and Livingston look to be right more and more.”
This idea was discussed here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/02/livingston-and-penn-paper-sunspots-may-vanish-by-2015/
Can someone explain in simple language what the following terms mean in the context of this thread and sunspots:
visible
invisible
gone (not there)
not gone but invisible
disappear
TSI
The mentioned paper said:
“…show consistent trends in which the darkest parts of the sunspot umbra have become warmer (45K per year) and their magnetic field strengths have decreased (77 Gauss per year), independently of the normal 11-year sunspot cycle. A linear extrapolation of these trends suggests that few sunspots will be visible after 2015.”
When I read the original Penn and Livingston paper the analogy I thought of was: If there is a dark stain on a white wall and I use white paint to re-paint the wall, the stain is not gone but it is invisible.
So is the Penn & Livingston observation equivalent to a Maunder or Dalton Minimum or something entirely new? At those times did “the darkest parts of the sunspot umbra … become warmer” and invisible, or were there none?
John Finn
Remember that SORCE was put into service into service in 2003 which was not the peak of cycle 23. On the contrary, it was already on the downslope considerably. If normalization of previous measurements can be believed (and the data in the link below seems reasonable), the decrease is .16% – for those of us keeping track at home…
http://solar.physics.montana.edu/SVECSE2008/pdf/woods_svecse.pdf
Assuming it is not TSI, the best guesses/theories I’ve seen are albedo/cosmic rays which has already been brought up, and the other is friction between the now diminished solar wind, and the atmosphere. Has not the atmosphere contracted? Meaning less surface area + less solar wind=cooler? I don’t remember if this was just thrown out as an idea by someone, or a link to a paper was offered. I don’t see a paper right off the bat in my files, so either there wasn’t one offered or I didn’t save it.
Part of the confusion about F10.7 and TSI comes from the fact that people forget [or don’t know or willfully ignore – yes, such people exist too…] that what we see comes from at least two sources. There is an obvious rotational signature [the vertical lines are 27 days apart – not one month] riding on top of a slowly varying background – the lower envelope as shown by my lines. These two contributions have different physical causes [and we don’t need to go into detail here about what those causes are – the diehards can go read http://www.leif.org/research/Synoptic-Radio-Observations.pdf ], the rotational contribution more closely linked to obvious solar activity [spots, plages, faculae, etc] while the background comes from more widespread magnetic fields [the ‘network’, ephemeral regions, coronal density (for F10.7)]. As the cycle peters out, the amplitude of the rotational component declines exponentially. As the new cycle slowly builds without any large spots yet, only the network and smallish emerging magnetic flux begin to increase, and that we see in the slow rise of the lower envelope [most clearly in the F10.7 curve]. Lumping the two components together [e.g. by showing an ‘average’ curve] is combining oranges and apples. So there is something for everybody: the rotational signal is going away, the background is rising, the meaningless average is flat-lining. Every sort of bias is supported by the data by suitable cherry picking.
“We know that the sun was responsible for climate change in the past, and so is clearly going to play the lead role in present and future climate change. And interestingly… solar activity has recently begun a downward cycle. Average global temperatures have dropped slightly over the past seven (now 8) years.”
–Ian Clark
-hydrogeologist and professor
-arctic specialist
-Department of Earth Sciences
-University of Ottawa
Have a look on the recent measured albedo curve. The link is from Leif,
http://www.leif.org/research/albedo.png
It is from this paper: http://bbso.njit.edu/Research/EarthShine/literature/Palle_etal_2006_EOS.pdf
Albedo has large variations with respect to its effect in the models. If this variation were inserted in the IPCC models we would have cooling inevitably.
“None of the major climate changes in the last 1000 years can be explained by co2….. The sun is driving climate change. Co2 is irrelevant.”
–Piers Corbyn
-solar physisist
-WeatherAction.com
-‘The SuperWeatherman’
Why does the 12 month running average not go to the end of the data? Shouldn’t the 12 month running average be the current month and the last 11 months rather than the 12 months ending roughly 11-12 months earlier?
New South Wales, Australia. Earliest snow in a decade…
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/nsw-has-first-snowfall-of-the-2009-season-20090426-aj6j.html
I’ve noted on this site before that the summer was cooler than last year. This autum has been cooler too, this winter is looking to be cold too. We’ll see. All that CO2 don’t appear to be doing a thing in the face of a cooling Sun.
Leif 21:27:50
Nice explanation for my question about why the flux curve is rising but not the TSI curve. So, will there be a clue in the rising(eventually) of the rotational component curve as to whether the spots will disappear or not? Or is that presently unknown?
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