I got a tip by email from JohnA who runs solarscience.auditblogs.com about this NASA press release. John’s skeptical about it. He makes some good points in this post here.
What I most agree with JohnA’s post is about sunspots. While we’ve seen some small rumblings that the solar dynamo might be on the upswing, such as watching Leif’s plot of the 10.7 CM solar radio flux, there just doesn’t appear to be much change in character of the sunspots during the last year. And the magnetic field strength just doesn’t seem to be ramping up much.
He writes:
“Let’s check out the window”
On Solarcycle24.com they’ve got yet another sun speck recorded yesterday, that by today had disappeared. Exactly the same behaviour we’ve been having for 12 months with no end in sight.
I agree with JohnA, it’s still a bit slow out there. Leif is at the conference in Boulder where NASA made this announcement below, so perhaps he’ll fill us in on the details.
Here is the NASA story:
Mystery of the Missing Sunspots, Solved?
June 17, 2009: The sun is in the pits of a century-class solar minimum, and sunspots have been puzzlingly scarce for more than two years. Now, for the first time, solar physicists might understand why.
At an American Astronomical Society press conference today in Boulder, Colorado, researchers announced that a jet stream deep inside the sun is migrating slower than usual through the star’s interior, giving rise to the current lack of sunspots.
Rachel Howe and Frank Hill of the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson, Arizona, used a technique called helioseismology to detect and track the jet stream down to depths of 7,000 km below the surface of the sun. The sun generates new jet streams near its poles every 11 years, they explained to a room full of reporters and fellow scientists. The streams migrate slowly from the poles to the equator and when a jet stream reaches the critical latitude of 22 degrees, new-cycle sunspots begin to appear.
Above: A helioseismic map of the solar interior. Tilted red-yellow bands trace solar jet streams. Black contours denote sunspot activity. When the jet streams reach a critical latitude around 22 degrees, sunspot activity intensifies. [larger image] [more graphics]
Howe and Hill found that the stream associated with the next solar cycle has moved sluggishly, taking three years to cover a 10 degree range in latitude compared to only two years for the previous solar cycle.
The jet stream is now, finally, reaching the critical latitude, heralding a return of solar activity in the months and years ahead.
“It is exciting to see”, says Hill, “that just as this sluggish stream reaches the usual active latitude of 22 degrees, a year late, we finally begin to see new groups of sunspots emerging.”
he current solar minimum has been so long and deep, it prompted some scientists to speculate that the sun might enter a long period with no sunspot activity at all, akin to the Maunder Minimum of the 17th century. This new result dispells those concerns. The sun’s internal magnetic dynamo is still operating, and the sunspot cycle is not “broken.”
Because it flows beneath the surface of the sun, the jet stream is not directly visible. Hill and Howe tracked its hidden motions via helioseismology. Shifting masses inside the sun send pressure waves rippling through the stellar interior. So-called “p modes” (p for pressure) bounce around the interior and cause the sun to ring like an enormous bell. By studying the vibrations of the sun’s surface, it is possible to figure out what is happening inside. Similar techniques are used by geologists to map the interior of our planet.
In this case, researchers combined data from GONG and SOHO. GONG, short for “Global Oscillation Network Group,” is an NSO-led network of telescopes that measures solar vibrations from various locations around Earth. SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, makes similar measurements from Earth orbit.
“This is an important discovery,” says Dean Pesnell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “It shows how flows inside the sun are tied to the creation of sunspots and how jet streams can affect the timing of the solar cycle.”
There is, however, much more to learn.
“We still don’t understand exactly how jet streams trigger sunspot production,” says Pesnell. “Nor do we fully understand how the jet streams themselves are generated.”
To solve these mysteries, and others, NASA plans to launch the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) later this year. SDO is equipped with sophisticated helioseismology sensors that will allow it to probe the solar interior better than ever before.
Right: An artist’s concept of the Solar Dynamics Observatory. [more]
“The Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) on SDO will improve our understanding of these jet streams and other internal flows by providing full disk images at ever-increasing depths in the sun,” says Pesnell.
Continued tracking and study of solar jet streams could help researchers do something unprecedented–accurately predict the unfolding of future solar cycles. Stay tuned for that!
Adolfo Giurfa (08:57:52) :
The results indicate that `solar dynamo’ that was long sought in the solar interior, operates more likely from the outside, by means of the varying planetary configurations. As has been shown in Charva tova (1995a, b, c, 1997a), the solar motion could aid predictions also for terrestrial phenomena including climate.
http://www.giurfa.com/charvatova.pdf
You are referring to the idea of spin-orbit coupling. This was discussed in great detail in the comments here
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/21/the-sun-double-blankety-blank-quiet/
The conclusion was that the spin-orbit coupling idea is not supported by science and is to be considered falsified. See also the gree update box at
http://arnholm.org/astro/sun/sc24/sim1/
We should look elsewhere to explain solar activity.
>>>The sun’s internal magnetic dynamo is still operating,
>>>and the sunspot cycle is not “broken.”
Not necessarily. If a jetstream is moving its latitude at a slower speed than usual, then this may well equate to decreased energy within the system that is driving this motion.
Thus the jetstream may well get to the magic 22 degrees latitude, and still prove to be a damp squib in terms of Sunspot numbers. Unless we have more data on more cycles, we simply cannot tell, but my best guess is that sluggish jetstream motion will equate to sluggish Sunspot activity.
Ralph
Hi Everybody–
I’m Frank Hill, the guy who gave the press release presentation in Boulder, and the Program Scientist for the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) helioseismology program. GONG is a set of six instruments located in California, Hawaii, Australia, India, Spain and Chile. GONG is a facility of the National Solar Observatory (NSO) component in Tucson, Arizona. We are not funded by NASA, but by the National Science Foundation (NSF), under a cooperative agreement with the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA). Our web site is http://gong.nso.edu. We did use some NASA data in our work, and that’s why they got involved with the press release.
I’ve been reading with great interest the comments on this blog, and I have to say I am very impressed by the enthusiasm and healthy skepticism generated by the press release. One of the key qualities of the scientific process is to question everything, probe for deficiencies and discuss alternative interpretations. Another key aspect is the ability to reject incorrect conclusions especially when you yourself make them.
I’d like to provide some more background, and respond to a few issues that have come up in the discussion so far. First of all, if you have not yet found it, here’s the URL for the press conference web site: http://spd.boulder.swri.edu/solar_mystery/. This page has the full set of unaltered graphics, including a movie of the inside of the sun over the last 14 years. In particular it has versions of the flow map that has a color bar indicating the speed of the flow, which was cropped off by the news media. The speed in the diagram ranges from +5 meters per sec (m/s) to -5 m/s. These speeds are residuals that remain after the surface differential rotation pattern is removed. The equivalent speed of the surface rotation ranges from about 2100 m/s at the equator to 1500 m/s at the poles. So, you can see that we are talking about a small flow compared to the rotation. The picture shows zero residual speeds as green, faster than average (positive) speeds as red/yellow, and slower than average (negative) speeds as blue.
The flow, which is actually known as the torsional oscillation (TO) in solar physics, was discovered on the surface of the sun in the early 1980s by Howard & LaBonte. We thus have only three solar cycles of observations that have measured the TO on the solar surface. Until we had the continual unbroken helioseismology observations that began in 1995 with GONG and SOHO, we did not know that the flow penetrated into the solar interior. We can see the pattern clearly down to about half-way through the convection zone (about 105,000 km below the surface), and we believe that it probably extends down to the tachocline at the base of the convection zone about 210,000 km deep. The results in the press release are at the relatively shallow depth of 7,000 km.
We used the term “jet stream” instead of “torsional oscillation” in the press release because most people are familiar with “jet stream” from daily weather reports, and because there are many similarities between the jet stream and the TO. There are, of course, also many differences.
The TO takes approximately 17 years to fully migrate from the sun’s poles to its equator. Thus, there are always two TO patterns present on the sun for a given solar cycle which lasts from 8 to 14 years. The helioseismic observations cover the whole of the sunspot cycle 23 (left side of the picture) and the start of cycle 24 (right side). However, the TO for cycle 23 started back in cycle 22, and the TO for cycle 24 has first visible in 2003. Thus the TO exists even when there are no sunspots on the sun, which to me suggests that it is a more fundamental feature of the process than the sunspots.. It is virtually certain that both the TO and the sunspots are consequences of an underlying and poorly understood dynamo mechanism that generates the solar magnetic field. Our results show an apparent association between the evolution of the flow and the timing of the appearance of sunspots for a cycle: the apparent delay of the new cycle is very similar to the extra length of time taken for the TO to travel to the latitude where the spots appeared in the last cycle. Now this is simply an association, and correlation alone certainly does not prove causality. But all science starts with this sort of observation.
In order to fully understand a recurring phenomenon, we typically need to observe many hundreds of periods. We only have 23 relatively well-observed solar cycles, and only three TO cycles so far. The image shows the entire set of helioseismic data of this phenomenon. It will take thousands of years, many human lifetimes to completely understand and sample all of the behaviors the sun throws at us, and we must do the best we can with our limited knowledge. The understanding gets continually refined as time goes on, more data is obtained, and better theories are developed.
The TO is not the same flow as the “solar conveyor belt”. That flow is a north-south flow, known as the meridional flow in solar physics. All flows: the torsional oscillation, the meridional flow, the changes in polar speed (see below), the tachocline, and the differential rotation must be taken into account in a full dynamo theory.
Turning to JeffK’s comments: the “polar jet stream” he refers to is the large yellow area in the center of the images at the top and bottom. However, this yellow (positive) speed alternates with blue (negative speed) unlike the “equatorial jet stream” which is a strip of positive speed in a sea of green (zero) speed. We thus interpret the “polar jet stream” as an alternating speed up and slow down of the poles of the sun, and this is actually the source of the torsional oscillation nomenclature. It is certainly clear that the polar speed up has not yet happened for cycle 24, and also clear that it started in cycle 23 just as the sunspots showed up. Since all three things (sunspot appearance, start of polar speedup and the TO reaching around 20 degrees) essentially happened at about the same time last cycle, and the TO has reached the same latitude as when everything took off last time, we conclude that it is likely that cycle 24 will take off soon as well. We will see.
Most solar physicists are not “desperate” for the sun to crank up its activity; instead we are fascinated by its behavior. With the hysteria over climate change and the hope of some people that we are entering a Maunder minimum so we can dispense with that global warming nonsense and keep on driving our gas guzzlers, solar physicists occasionally feel the need to point out the solar dynamo is apparently chugging along as usual with only small deviations from its normal behavior.
For those who think this is a “condescending” article and who scoff because there are no sunspots today, the message was meant to be that the typical rapid onset of activity is likely to happen soon, say in the next few months. Not tomorrow. Sorry if it was confusing.
Keep up the thinking, and discussing, folks!
Jim Hughes (14:18:41) :
I am sorry your having a rough time getting it right but like I told Mike. We all know that this cycle is behaving differently.
— Never had a problem projecting spots since 1965, the year I got my first scope. Problems aiming a 60mm with a .925 eyepeice…yes. Spot visibility..no.
2008 – no problem projecting 90% of what Mt. Wilson drew. They have a 12″ APO, I have a 70mm Achromat, 4.5″ reflector and a 16″ reflector.
(DO NOT point a wide open 16″ Newt at the Sun !!)
Don’t be sorry for me, be sorry for the Sun.
What’s your scope collection look like?
For ‘misguided’ minority who happen to believe that magnetic field in plasma could only exist as a result of an electric current flow
Wouldn’t that be Maxwell, J. C.?
rbateman (14:13:50) :
Nasif Nahle (13:05:10) :
rbateman (12:41:22):
That’s May, 1977, 12 months after minimum.
So, we’ve got what, 6 months to go depending on where the current minimum should be?
Testing 1 2 3
Got it! Six months ahead for testing if jet-streams really are causing the spotless Sun, as NASA scientists have assumed. We’ll see by the next December…
The whole tone of this thing reads like a condescending Papal edict from those “who know what’s best for us”.
Are we actually that much further ahead than 5,000 years ago when a group of elders proudly showed the tribal leaders their new monument and emphasized how the wise priests now understood the Sun: they could even predict its behaviour by looking through those columns at Stonehenge – what proof of power and wisdom!
What piffle from NASA.
Frank Hill 15:40:00
Excellent, and thanks. Now couldn’t a dynamo that complex be subject to perturbation by tidal forces from barycentric action?
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vukcevic (14:11:51) :
…the largest man-made magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment currently in operation. Its main purpose is to open the way to future nuclear fusion experimental reactors (sun’s helium is a product of hydrogen fusion)…
And in massive stars (8-28 M), Helium becomes a nuclear fuel during presupernova or supergiant evolution. Helium lasts “burning” for about 500 thousand years. After Helium, the stages of burning” continue in sequence: Carbon, Neon and Silicon.
@ur momisugly George Varros (12:51:56) :
Think electrical.
Where did your ideas originate from: ” A few years back, I did some garage experiments with helium and flyback transformers and was able to inflate field lines away from a persistent electrical arc and sustain them occasionally by allowing just the right amount of gas to flow, to allow a portion of the electrical arc to bubble out.”
“[T}ransformers” are electrical. An “electrical arc” is obviously electrical. Here on Earth no one disputes a magnetic field is only derived by an electric current. The transformer likely modulated the electric arc (electric current) causing the magnetic field to change in shape in response to the change in current density of the electric arc. The helium possibly ionized in the presence of the electric arc forming a plasma that in turn modulated the magnetic field and the electric arc. A “plasma current” is a current of charged particles (electrons and ions). Electrons which have ordered movement are defined as an electric current, which will generate a magnetic field.
I want to commend your experimental work.
And I commend your effort at trying to publish your ideas in a peer-reviewed journal, that takes a lot of work and perseverance.
Do you know about plasmoids?
What is the relationship, if any, between a spheromak and a plasmoid?
I think if you compare a plasmoid and a spheromak, you’ll find they are similar. In fact, plasmoids also can take a toroidal shape.
Keep going with your ideas and the experimental work.
By the way, Silicon lasts “on fire” only one day. That’s the future of our yellow dwarf star. Sometimes I’ve thought if the Sun is not going in the opposite way, that is, if instead going on towards being a white dwarf, it is actually running towards being a giant. Nah!
Is it possible that the effect, assumed from the cycles, of barycentric action is not the tidal forces that Leif assures us are insignificant in the sun, but is instead felt directly on earth and determines the apparent cyclicity in the climate, by local, and not solar effects?
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The earth is freely falling with respect to the gravitational forces acting upon it from the big planets, but not with respect to the gravitational forces acting from them upon the sun. Is it enough to perturb the system? What system?
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Frank Hill 15:40:00
That was excellent, and thanks. It looks as if the dynamo is increasingly complicated, the more we know about it. So much for platitudes. Can it possibly be such a fundamentally delicately balanced interweaving of forces, this dynamo, could it have a point where perturbation by the miniscule tidal forces from the big planets might effect the overall manifestation of the dynamo?
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Heh, I must have a guilty conscience. I wrote the repetitive 17:53:04 because I thought my 16:49:35 had been deleted for mention of the ‘b’ word.
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Carsten Arnholm, Norway (15:12:34) :
You are referring to the idea of spin-orbit coupling. This was discussed in great detail in the comments here
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/21/the-sun-double-blankety-blank-quiet/
The conclusion was that the spin-orbit coupling idea is not supported by science and is to be considered falsified. See also the gree update box at
http://arnholm.org/astro/sun/sc24/sim1/
We should look elsewhere to explain solar activity.
This is not science….you have been challenged by myself and Ian Wilson to present your findings properly including the data and to also have it peer reviewed. You have declined. So nothing is falsified and you are being misleading to all in here and others that read your website.
This was “news” way back in 2006: http://www.physorg.com/news66581392.html
Except they predicted cycle 24 was going to be HUGE, with #25 being smaller as a result of the slowing conveyor.
@ur momisugly vukcevic (14:11:51) :
Your characterization of the Sun being electrical in nature is correct based on the evidence I have seen.
I agree with you that irradiance is not the full measure of the Earth’s energy budget received from the Sun, but also must include the additional electromagnetic energy the Earth receives from the Sun as well.
Your diagrams add to my base of knowledge and understanding. I found your paper on the Sun’s cycle of electromagnetic energy (solar maximum and solar minimum). Your description and explanation is interesting. It is one of the better explanations on why the Sun’s electromagnetic eneryg level cycles.
You are ironic — it is not the ‘misguided’, of course, who understand that the Sun is electrical in nature, rather, it is those that have enough common sense to believe their own eyes (noting the difference between the solar maximum and solar minimum) and who recognize and respect the established laws of physics.
Dear Frank Hill
Thank you very much for spending the time to make your lengthy response to our probing questions.
I’ve been reading with great interest the comments on this blog, and I have to say I am very impressed by the enthusiasm and healthy skepticism generated by the press release. One of the key qualities of the scientific process is to question everything, probe for deficiencies and discuss alternative interpretations. Another key aspect is the ability to reject incorrect conclusions especially when you yourself make them.
I completely agree with this statement. Which brings me to my point which I made here on my blog. The lack of sunspots when the TO has already reached the “critical” latitude of 22 degrees means that the hypothesis has already been falsified, or at least, been shown to be oversimplistic, as you yourself make the point:
However, the TO for cycle 23 started back in cycle 22, and the TO for cycle 24 has first visible in 2003. Thus the TO exists even when there are no sunspots on the sun, which to me suggests that it is a more fundamental feature of the process than the sunspots.
Which leads me to the next point:
<eMIt is certainly clear that the polar speed up has not yet happened for cycle 24, and also clear that it started in cycle 23 just as the sunspots showed up. Since all three things (sunspot appearance, start of polar speedup and the TO reaching around 20 degrees) essentially happened at about the same time last cycle, and the TO has reached the same latitude as when everything took off last time, we conclude that it is likely that cycle 24 will take off soon as well. We will see.
So which causes the other? Or was it coincidence? Under what set of circumstances is your theory falsified?
Most solar physicists are not “desperate” for the sun to crank up its activity; instead we are fascinated by its behavior. With the hysteria over climate change and the hope of some people that we are entering a Maunder minimum so we can dispense with that global warming nonsense and keep on driving our gas guzzlers, solar physicists occasionally feel the need to point out the solar dynamo is apparently chugging along as usual with only small deviations from its normal behavior.
I don’t hope to keep driving a gas guzzler. I don’t even own a car. What I want to avoid is impoverishing the lives of my children because of the hysteria over a minor constituent of the atmosphere. I want better, clearer and more useful science to help us all make better choices.
I do hope for a coherent theory of climate that actually includes the key actor in the drama – the longterm behavior of the Sun. Somehow, somewhere we should be able to point to specific interactions between the Sun’s variation and the Earth’s atmosphere/ocean system and be able to show clear mechanisms. I suppose that the reason why we at WUWT and elsewhere have been so fascinated (and enthusiastic!) about solar science is that we would like solar science to be a whole lot better at characterizing the behavior of the Sun, because at the moment, its a free-for–all of competing hypotheses.
And so far, all of the ones that have predicted the upswing of solar cycle 24 have been flat out wrong. I would urge solar scientists to step forward and say so. Keeping solar science honest means a clear-out of bad ideas and an acknowledgement of ignorance of how the Sun behaves and how scientific predictions should be communicated.
Finally, as a personal note, I make no personal attacks of solar scientists or question their motivations. Climate science is above “neck deep” in accusations and counter-accusations and little useful energy is left to advance the science itself. So I criticize predictions of solar behavior because the predictions are wrong, not because I think solar scientists are stupid or corrupt (they’re not).
So I welcome your intervention into comments on this blog and look forward to more engagement by the solar science community in this exciting field.
JohnA
Frank Hill
Thanks for your time here.
I think it would be helpful for you and others at GONG to engage in an effort to connect a few dots. By that I mean its way past time for some of you to grab hold of the policy making community and point out the obvious correlations associated with a weak or long solar cycle.
Its obvious the sun is a variable star. You go to great lengths to point this out. You just don’t come out and say it. This sir is a great injustice and will result in immense social disruption. Please use your status and your knowledge to convey to others what possibilities lie ahead if the suns jet stream is late in getting started.
Frank Hill (15:40:00) :
With the hysteria over climate change and the hope of some people that we are entering a Maunder minimum so we can dispense with that global warming nonsense and keep on driving our gas guzzlers, solar physicists occasionally feel the need to point out the solar dynamo is apparently chugging along as usual with only small deviations from its normal behavior.
———————————-
Great post Frank. It’s a testament to Anthony’s high standards that you would come on this blog and post that.
Given that, I do feel a bit guilty in advance by perhaps correcting you on one of your conclusions (above). I think it’s fair to speak on behalf of a number of posters on here. The apparent “hope of some people that we are entering a Maunder minimum” is probably overreaching. I think many posters on here express some satisfaction at the recent cooling, not because they feel a need to drive “gas guzzlers” but rather that it will, hopefully, bring a timely end to the corruption and distortion of the real scientific process by some prominent so-called “scientists” (and their political nitwit friends).
Humanity has many, many real problems to deal with, including those related to the environment, the complex, real solutions to which would be supported by the vast majority, if not all of the posters on this site.
Jim Hughes
“Or that the limb proximity of Region 1021 is bad now so the sunspot might not be gone, just unable to be seen. When does it end ?”
The sunspot is unable to be seen?? And how are we supposed to compare UNSEEN sunspots to the historical record??? We need a CONSTANT RECORD THAT IS COMPARABLE TO THE HISTORIC RECORD if it is to have consistent usefulness!!!!
There MAY have been unseen sunspots in the past. Now that we are able to “see” and measure these “unseen” sunspots there should be a parallel record of them. The historic record should NOT be contaminated with apples and rocks.
Frank Hill writes
Most solar physicists are not “desperate” for the sun to crank up its activity; instead we are fascinated by its behavior. With the hysteria over climate change and the hope of some people that we are entering a Maunder minimum so we can dispense with that global warming nonsense and keep on driving our gas guzzlers, solar physicists occasionally feel the need to point out the solar dynamo is apparently chugging along as usual with only small deviations from its normal behavior.This assertion would be more impressive you had refrained from saying “gas guzzlers”.
It would also be more impressive were it not glaringly obvious that the sun is grossly deviating from the behavior that has been observed over the past few hundred years.
It would also be more impressive if your organization, and presumably you yourself as spokesman for that organization had not issued a long serious of false prediction that the sun would shortly resume normal activity.
vukcevic (14:11:51) :
For ‘misguided’ minority who happen to believe that magnetic field in plasma could only exist as a result of an electric current flow this image
http://www.geocities.com/vukcevicu/ElctCurrent-Plasma.jpg
Clearly I am confused. Are you being facetious?
Mark
vukcevic,
“For ‘misguided’ minority who happen to believe that magnetic field in plasma could only exist as a result of an electric current flow this image…”
The reference you provide is to an artificial, externally forced, field. How does this compare to Nebulae or Jets seen by astronomers where there is no external containment equipment????
Admittedly, in the sun, there could be externally contained plasma bodies. My WAG is not. Additionally, are there not current(s) flowing in ALL plasmas whether they are self maintaining or not?? Isn’t this part of the DRIFT that has made it so difficult to build a stable, producing, reactor??