More on the NRC 10.7 observatory here
JohnA writes in:
Just in case you wondered whether the recent large sunspot indicated an upswing in radio flux from the Sun: I went and asked Ken Tapping.
The answer: http://solarscience.auditblogs.com/2009/07/10/ken-tapping-still-no-sign-of-the-next-cycle/
This could be the first “radio quiet” solar cycle
Previously on this blog, I’d mentioned my skepticism that one decent sunspot marked the end of the hiatus in the solar cycle we’ve seen for nearly two years. It might be my nature, but everybody has been wrong before.
As part of my public duty to actually ask real scientists monitoring the Sun, I wrote to Dr Ken Tapping of Canada’s National Research Council at the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in British Columbia:
Dear Dr Tapping
For the first time in a very long time, the Sun has managed to produce a sunspot (1024) which has lasted more than a few hours.
Is there any sign of an upswing in radio emissions indicating an end to the hiatus?
Best regards
John
and Dr Tapping replied (with my emphasis):
Hi John,
Last weekend I saw a really nice sunspot group on the Sun, which could have been part of the new cycle. The solar radio flux went up a little while it was there. However now the flux has slumped back to low values again.
Some theorists have suggested the new cycle is currently under way, but that for some unknown reason we are not getting the spots to go with it. I’m not sure what that really means, so I am making no suggestion as to what is going on.
Being very conservative, according to the measurements being made under our Solar Radio Monitoring Programme, we have yet to see signs the next cycle is really under way.
Regards,
Ken
Now this is what I’d thought, that the nice sunspot (1024) we’d seen did not presage a change in the behavior of the Sun: the solar wind speed remained subdued, coronal holes remained very small, there were no prominences to speak of.
It also baffles me how “some theorists have suggested the new cycle is currently under way, but that for some unknown reason we are not getting the spots to go with it”. If there are very few sunspots and the radio flux remains extremely subdued, on what basis are these theorists making their statements?
It could be that this is the first “radio quiet” solar cycle … anyone believe that?
So for solar physicists, it remains “interesting times” and probably a time to clear out some old theories and start again.
My thanks to Dr Tapping for the correspondence.
Richard Sharpe (15:37:11) :
To your north here. You have what we had last year. Those darn incessant winds of last year, they never went away, and this year they are decidedly cool.
A quick check of a Harry Geise style long-range based on the sunspot activity shows a deteriorating season starting in August, leading to rains in September.
We’ll see.
Excellent analogy, tallbloke. Cold-phase PDO’s produce weaker El Nino’s, and La Nina predominates the menu.
Modoki.
Welling up the warmer waters where the heat can be sucked out.
To be replaced with ever colder waters.
Down scope.
Warmer water being “sucked up” to replace the Cooler Water, above?
That’s doesn’t pass the “huh?” test. The surface has to be warming as a result of the heat not being dissipated. It will, eventually, warm the cooler water farther down if it’s not dispersed. The quickest, most efficient way of doing this has got to be Storms.
Remember, the “Storm Index” has been very low for the last year, or so.
Perhaps we should expect a few peerreviewedpublishedpapers on Sol-24 modoki 😉
Kum Dollison etc. there is some serious discussion about HADCRUT SST’s NOAA’s SST don’t seem to correspond with RSS at CA and Lucia’s Blackboard. Also yes UNISYS seems to look very different to NOASS SST graph Knowing NASA’s stand on AGW… Houston we have a problem LOL
bill (15:35:35) :
“Why people keep bringing this into the GW “debate” I cannot understand.”
bill, are you really questioning why one might want to consider the activity of the local star/giant ball of fire in the sky, when debating Earth’s climate?
the_Butcher (15:06:31) :
No one knows for certain what is coming. But if people like Piers Corbyn are right (and he is right much more than he is wrong) then we are heading for cooling.
One thing that has become clear is that the climate models that forecast disasters coming to the earth from manmade co2 are flawed and unreliable. Their predictions are not happening.
“Model results and observed temperature trends are in disagreement in most of the tropical troposphere, being separated by more than twice the uncertainty of the model mean.”
http://www.uah.edu/News/pdf/climatemodel.pdf
“The results show that models perform poorly…. …a common argument that models can perform better at larger spatial scales is unsupported.”
http://www.atypon-link.com/IAHS/doi/abs/10.1623/hysj.53.4.671?cookieset=1
Just The Facts (17:10:14) :
bill, are you really questioning why one might want to consider the activity of the local star/giant ball of fire in the sky, when debating Earth’s climate?
The ball of fire is very important, however its variability (currently) is very unimportant.
A real scale image of its importance is shown here:
http://img528.imageshack.us/img528/7777/tsico2realscale.jpg
The variability is minimal hence the effect on climate is minimal.
In spite of how you interpret what Ken Tapping says it is plain that solar cycle 24 has begun:
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png
What he probably meant was that SC24 has not yet produced any serious solar activity, no X-ray flares, for instance. But there can be no discussion that we are in SC24 right now. F10.7 is perhaps the cleanest indication, but also the ratio between SC23 and SC24 activity.
Bill says: “The ball of fire is very important, however its variability (currently) is very unimportant. The variability is minimal hence the effect on climate is minimal.”
You assume that TSI (Total Solar Irradiance) is the only way that the Sun can affect Earth’s climate. Svensmark has suggested another patthway. What if solar minimums and volcanic eruptions correlated?? To quote Dr Jack Eddy:
“Were God to give us, at last, the cable, or patch-cord that links the Sun to the Climate System it would have on the solar end a banana plug, and on the other, where it hooks into the Earth—in ways we don’t yet know—a Hydra-like tangle of multiple 24-pin parallel computer connectors.”
Aw, c’mon. Quit picking on the poor sun. It’s trying as hard as it can to sprout spots!
bill (17:32:22):The ball of fire is very important, however its variability (currently) is very unimportant.
When you say “currently”, you mean, “based on our limited current understanding”? All because we don’t fully understand how the sun works and how it impacts Earth’s climate, doesn’t make it unimportant. TSI is a measure of one of the Sun’s impacts on Earth’s climate system. There are probably several more that we don’t fully understand yet, e.g. solar impact on cosmic rays and cosmic rays impact on cloud formation. Dismissing what we do not understand is generally not an effective technique for expanding human knowledge.
bill (17:32:22) :
“The variability is minimal hence the effect on climate is minimal.”
It appears we’re running the experiment to test that hypothesis right now.
One obvious effect of the sun (and also the moon ) on this rock is gravity. That means tidal effects, not just on the oceans, but also the atmosphere and the mantle, etc. Has anybody bothered to plug that into a model?
One sunspot does not make a complete cycle, neither does one fine group, similarly one brief time of sunspot observations will not make a solar scientist entirely happy.
(Apologizes to Aristotle and his comment on swallows and summer)
Most of the July sunspot activity is related to one small group which has disappeared behind the sun’s limb. Nothing is seen emerging and the sunspot count for July 11 is now zero.
SIDC
TODAY’S ESTIMATED ISN : 000, BASED ON 09 STATIONS.
SOLAR INDICES FOR 11 Jul 2009
WOLF NUMBER CATANIA : 000
10CM SOLAR FLUX : 068
AK CHAMBON LA FORET : ///
AK WINGST : 006
ESTIMATED AP : 003
ESTIMATED ISN : 000, BASED ON 16 STATIONS.
http://sidc.oma.be/products/meu/index.php
Even if Cycle 24 has started the issue is “how strong will it be?”
We won’t really know how intense it will be until Cycle 24 ends and Cycle 25 begins.
The Sun, in its 4 billion year life, may have had about 400 million sunspot cycles. We are now trying to predict its behavior based on 24 cycles of 400 million.
How much confidence would you have in a poll of about 20 people of 304 million US citizens?
As one who has followed the travails of the experts trying to first forecast Cycle 24 and then trying to explain the dearth of sunspots, we should not declare the “minimum is over”.
Yes, we have “The One”, but does it mean that we won’t have another period of low or no activity?
It was only a few years ago, that the experts predicted a very intense Cycle 24 based on their “theories” and their proven accuracy in predicting the intensity of Cycle 23.
http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast19oct98_1.htm
“Oct. 19, 1998: Scientists at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center appear to have done a good job of predicting Cycle 23 of the sunspot cycle.
“They expect Cycle 23 to continue until sometime in 2006 when the next cycle, Cycle 24, should begin.” (If you invert the 6 in 2006 … they were correct.)
Too bad the Sun wasn’t invested in the “proven” theory.
No expert predicted the late start of Cycle 24 or the deep quiet phase of the sun in all measurable energies.
We live in exciting Solar times … stay tuned for the conclusion of Cycle 24 … and, if possible, the complete Cycle 25.
Tallbloke: Do you know of any papers that describes that phenomenon, do you have any articles to back it up, just curious?
The oceans seem to be on the downslope temp. wise again according to UNISYS, with SST’s in the South Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and apparently the South Pacific winding down.
“Warmer water being “sucked up” to replace the Cooler Water, above?
That’s doesn’t pass the “huh?” test. The surface has to be warming as a result of the heat not being dissipated. It will, eventually, warm the cooler water farther down if it’s not dispersed. The quickest, most efficient way of doing this has got to be Storms.
Remember, the “Storm Index” has been very low for the last year, or so.”
The storm index has been very low for 30 odd years, I believe. I think of it this way. You have this enormous amount of liquid water with a tiny amount of gaseous water and other gases ( the atmosphere) between it and the terribly cold vacuum of space. Would the temperature of the gas control the temperature of the water? It doesn’t seem very intuitive. What controls the temperature of the water? Well, have you ever stood outside in the tropics on a cloudless day? Imagine all of that heat energy hitting the surface of the oceans. What happens next? Again… does the average temperature of the gas control the average temperature of the liquid?! Or maybe it’s the other way around? Surely the climate is a function of how the heat absorbed from sunlight by the oceans is transmitted back into space? Of course, the atmosphere effects how much heat gets to the surface of the ocean in the first place via cloudiness which in turn is strongly influenced by the surface temperature of the oceans… negative feedback?
bill (15:35:35) : The late small upturn is completely upstaged by the years-long, really big looking downtrend that preceded this minimum. Who knows if it will start going up at the rate it went down over the last several years??
Madman (17:58:33) You are on to something madman. The solar model was not able to call the length of this minimum and the current “forecast” amplitude of this cycle was revised downwards. If the people trying to model the Sun would just confess they don’t know any more than the tea-leaf reader down the street, they might have some credibility. But as it stands, you might as well ask a 5 year old … the answer will be as good or better.
This casual PDF might be of interest. Comes from ongoing things I am doing with a variety of data.
http://www.gpsl.net/climate/data/radio_flux_a.pdf
Even with a few more cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere, their effect on your body is probably minimal.
Radiation in small doses actually improves immune system function.
The effect is called hormesis. Hormesis is a general term. It means stress on the immune system improves its function. Some poisons do that as well.
Curiousgeorge (19:03:42) :
One obvious effect of the sun (and also the moon ) on this rock is gravity. That means tidal effects, not just on the oceans, but also the atmosphere and the mantle, etc. Has anybody bothered to plug that into a model?
Why do you call yourself CuriousGeorge?…
I don’t think that anybody has plugged tidal effects on the atmosphere and the mantle into their models. They probably haven’t plugged half of the things we know about into their models. And for sure they haven’t plugged any of the things we don’t know about yet into them…
In mid May we saw the strongest plage readings in over a year. On June first we saw the strongest x-ray background flux reading in 400 plus days.
The most recent group on the sun, Region 1024, produced as many flares as we had seen during the prior fifteen months. And the strongest at that. The group was also the largest in this time frame as well.
And people think it’s still going flatline with what has shown up in the past 60 days ? It’s going to be a quieter cycle and most realize this now. But Cycle 24 is not going to jump right up and start cranking out large sunspot regions and major flares on a daily to weekly basis.
“Warmer water being “sucked up” to replace the Cooler Water, above?” huh? test….ok.
Oh for crying out loud, there is but a little imagination required.
Warmer than the waters at the surface that have been blasted by the colder winds or cooled by extended winter. They then sink.
How else do you expect the ocean to get on the downslope temp?
“Ring…..ring….ring”
‘ Ocean control here’
“yeah, hey Neptune, Gore order #311b2 is to drop the water temp for the next 30 years, but not until the Master Agenda is in place.’
‘Hmpffhh. Whatever. Ok, I’ll get to it in a year or two’.
(heh..heh….heh… I’ll fix him.)
Leif Svalgaard (17:41:19)
What he probably meant was that SC24 has not yet produced any serious solar activity, no X-ray flares, for instance.
——————-
They haven’t really added up to a hill of beans but there have been some Cycle 24 flares.