From Spaceweather.com
NASA’s STEREO-B spacecraft is monitoring an active region hidden behind the sun’s eastern limb.
On May 5th, it produced an impressive coronal mass ejection (movie) and a burst of Type II radio emissions caused by a shock wave plowing through the sun’s outer atmosphere. STEREO-B’s extreme UV telescope captured this image during the explosion:
Activity continued apace on May 6th with at least two more eruptions. Furthermore, recent UV images from STEREO-B reveal not just one but two active regions: image below.
At the root of all this activity is probably a complex of sunspots. The region is not yet visible from Earth, but the sun is turning it toward us for a better view. Readers with solar telescopes should keep an eye on sun’s northeastern limb for an emergence on May 7th or 8th.
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Ric Werme;
OOPS! the memory banks must be fading or I missed it which is not often when WUWT is concerned.
Well if a big CME hits sometime in the near future and the world goes to hell in a bread basket, Anthony will be able to say, “Should’ve read my blog!”
Maybe so, but its like trying to kill cockroaches with ripple sole shoes – they keep coming back
Allan, I corrected your quote.
“An interesting article by James A Marusek on the two alternative paths that the next solar cycle may go down.”
Considering the time devoted to the second path, ‘Grand Minima’, he may be tipping his hand. Our expert predicts the former, but Janssens’ spotless days progressions and lengths point to a regime change to a few cycles of comparative quiet.
And, of course, the cyclomaniacs called it Grand Minima years ago. I’ll go with Bateman’s forecast for presumptuous CME activity by sunspeck.
Read up on the Carrington flare of 1859.
James A Marusek, retired Navy man and Physicist has writen a couple of papers on the consequences. See reference as posted by ROM
Plus a long winded paper with some scary predictions at the end
Sloar Storm Predictions and Threat analysis
It seems that the Federal Government and the Military did a great deal of study on the effects of CME during the cold war. Of course their study was related to the CME effects of a nuclear blast. Some of the systems were “protected”
to prevent their damage by CME but one of our blasts just wouldn’t measure up the that put out by our friend Ole Sol. The results of the studies were not good news for the industrialized world.
Bill Derryberry
Cycle 24 for real and at last? It may be, hurrah. Though it is mighty interesting to watch what the sun is doing regardless.
It’s pretty amusing to me to watch Spaceweather.com cheerleading Cycle 24 (and higher solar activity). whenever there is anything that even hints at higher activity they are ready to announce ‘THE SUN IS BACK!’ .
Re: ROM (03:23:30)
Has the Earth ever taken a direct hit from a CME, perhaps in pre-industrial times, say?
100 quatloos on a cycle 23 spot!
And National Geographic just published the quiet sun article. This is the NatGeo Effect?
Even the mainstream media is catching on, but notice the obligatory disclaimer about climate change at the end.
———–
Posted on Wed, May. 06, 2009
Theories on calmer sun flare up
By SCOTT CANON
The Kansas City Star
Could Earth’s star, that life-giving ball of fire worshipped by the ancients and the tanned alike, be mellowing?
New research suggests the sun might be calming, erupting in fewer solar flares and winds that send cosmic rays spraying out toward the planets.
That could mean colder weather. And although it’s not time to put away your Ray-Bans, the sun also could be dimming ever so slightly.
A similar phenomenon caused what’s often called the Little Ice Age that chilled Europe and North America enough to form an ice barrier around Greenland and freeze solid the canals of the Netherlands.
Scientists don’t yet know if the seemingly calmer sun will linger in this lull. It’s too early to tell.
Yet a more tranquil sun would mean less protection from cosmic rays swirling into the solar system from elsewhere in our galaxy. That, in turn — assuming a controversial correlation between clouds and cosmic rays is correct — might mean fewer clouds, and without that pillowy cumulus, we might…bake more than ever.
Or … without them, the warming blanket effect of clouds could be lost and we could chill.
“You could have all these competing effects,” said Gregory Rudnick, an astronomy professor at the University of Kansas. “We don’t have a really good understanding of this.”
What’s known is that solar activity is as mild as it’s been in nearly a century.
The sun has always been an up-and-down heavenly body, regularly running through 11-year cycles of high and low flaring and winds and sunspots as its magnetic poles switch from north to south and back.
That overlaps with the Gleissberg Cycle, which runs roughly 80 years. If the universe is seeing those two line up now, the effect on Earth could be a decade or two of slightly lower temperatures.
Last year was at the bottom of the 11-year cycle with its next peak due in 2013 — most obvious in the form of more dramatic northern lights on Earth.
Yet 2008 was even more placid on the fiery orb than in most down years. Sunspots were seen barely one day out of four, the calmest since 1913.
So far this year, they’ve been seen hardly one day in 10.
If the effect is to cool the Earth, as in the so-called Maunder Minimum, the Little Ice Age that ran from 1645 to 1715, some scientists worry that it would mask the effects of global warming caused by a buildup of greenhouse gases.
“The problem is if the sun is, indeed, going into a minimum, which we don’t know yet, people will think that we don’t have to act on climate change,” said Angela Speck, an astrophysicist at the University of Missouri. “The sun came back out of that minimum in the 18th century” — when the River Thames turned to ice — “and it will come back out of this.”
“I’m inclined to think the effects are real,” said Adrian Melott, another KU astrophysicist. “But the evidence is nowhere as solid as it is for the carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere” and climate change.
“My worry,” he said, “is that it will lower temperatures and cause people to think it’s OK to burn all that coal and oil.”
Theories on calmer sun flare up
By SCOTT CANON
The Kansas City Star
http://www.kansascity.com/105/story/1183017.html
It’s not even clear that the sun is, however temporarily, dimming. At most, it might be losing a tenth of a percent of its brightness and that might be a factor in changing temperatures on Earth.
Whatever is happening, it’s not the dying of our star.
The ball of gas took shape almost 5 billion years ago and is actually growing ever hotter. Scientists think it has at least another 5 billion years left.
Holy crap! The sun has turned green! Run for your lives!!
Jeff 06:53:12 – “Holy crap! The sun has turned green! Run for your lives!!”
No no no, don’t run, duck and cover!
We’re just seeing some preliminary activity and the sun will be waking up more during the month of June. And we’re going to to see the highest level of activity since March 2008.
“Holy crap! The sun has turned green! Run for your lives!!’
That is funny!
Without any historic comparison, this is a little miss-leading. Can some one direct us to a photo or movie of a medium and large CME?
@ur momisugly Joseph: I believe there was a a big CME event in 1859, called the Carrington Event after the chap who actually saw it happening at the time, British astronomer Richard Carrington. See Wikipedia for more details.
“No no no, don’t run, duck and cover!”
Hit the ground and roll. That usually works.
Have there been events as big as this one during this minimum-say the last 12 months-?
It seems the AGW/MMCC believers are praying for more active sun, hoping and praying to the god sol that she will awake from her slumber to smite the infidel denialists and lay them low!
The AGW narrative ignored the sun as marginal when it suited, now if solar activity ramps up they can say that the lower temperatures were down to the sun and the denialists were wrong to question the dangerous global warming dogma, quite clever of them but a little desperate too.
Perhaps its the only card the AGWers have left to play, if the sun stays quiet and temperatures keep falling their cause is all but lost.
Allan M R Macrae:-))
I don’t think you are that much OT, it could have been a Solar Wind Farm!
Rob:-)
Those numbers are wonderfully Micky Mouse numbers they almost blow the mind, it puts everything into significance & perspective for me.
Having read the SPMs for FAR, SAR, TAR, & the FA……….doh!, didn’t think of that, even more reason to think this lot are a bunch of bureaucrats, then the SPM for AR4(they should have thought of that form first) table on forcing influences, I think I said a while ago now, that with all the apparent climate influences totalled up we have an increased heat input of a whopping 1.66W/m² which is 1.12% over the apparent natural Greenhouse forcing of 148W/m², big deal according to Lord Monkton! Also, the most critical thing about these SPMs is the level of scientific understanding attached to each forcing. We have gone in 6 years from IPCC SPM 2001 to IPCC SPM 2007 of having a “very low level of scientific understanding” about solar forcing, which means in lay terms “not much of a clue really” to a “low level scientific understanding”, which means “we have a lot more data than we had before, some good theories & ideas, but that’s it folks”! Such is the advancement of solar science in that vast time period. So how on Earth can any AGWer of any status say with absolute confidence, that the Sun plays a very small role in Climate effects, when by the IPCC’s own WRITTEN IN BLACK AND WHITE PUBLIC ADMISSION TWICE IN SIX YEARS, states that they don’t really know that much about it? Were I to claim as a professional, that something I opined upon had little effect on a structure, yet at the same time publicly admitted I knew very little about its effects, I would be up before a Professional Conduct Committee were there to be an issue later on! Put another way, if the IPCC were an team of surgeons, & they said they had a low level of understanding of how the heart worked, yet they were happy to do your heart bypass operation, would you trust them to get it right? Not me guys!
Forgot to add, I am waiting with bated breath for Keanu Reeves as Klaatu to decend upon the Earth any minute now. Not a patch on the original!
AtB
From the Masurek paper:
“This field deflects many of the cosmic rays away from Earth. But when the sun goes quiet (minimal sunspots), this field collapses inward allowing high energy cosmic rays to penetrate deeper into our solar system. As a result, far greater numbers collide with Earth and penetrate down into the lower atmosphere…”
is typical of the nonsense out there. The cosmic ray intensity goes up by a few percent at minimum [and mostly the lowest energy cosmic rays are affected].
Cassandra King (08:12:47) :
It seems the AGW/MMCC believers are praying for more active sun, hoping and praying to the god sol that she will awake from her slumber
Of course, they are, and fanatically, but if it wakes up, that “energy money” will not go right away to “shopping” but to saving in the seas, so they would have to wait 6 to 8 years more.
Jeff Alberts (06:53:12) :
“Holy crap! The sun has turned green! Run for your lives!!”
Thank God I had just put my coffee cup down and swallowed before I read this.