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.
Madman (17:58:33) :
“What if solar minimums and volcanic eruptions correlated??”
Maybe Ra is angry. Lets find a virgin and head for the volcano!
Jim Hughes (20:53:34) :
They haven’t really added up to a hill of beans but there have been some Cycle 24 flares.
Small ones, yes.
I am a big fan of this website and truly appreciate all of the contributions made here. I am far from any kind of expert on climate.
I have been watching proponents of AGW downplay solar activity. Eigil Friis-Christensen’s paper showed how much climate matched solar activity over the past 250 years up until early 1980’s. Then, according to warmers, we see temps climb while ‘solar activity dropped’, and that seems to be where warmers say carbon took over.
Can it really be said that ‘solar activity dropped’?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sunspot_Numbers.png
It looks like the cycles that dominated the last 50 years of the 20th Century established an entire new baseline compared to previous cycles. Don’t we have to look at that baseline more that individual cycles? I can see S22 & S23 were a little lower, but just by eyeballing the baseline over 50 years… it looks like you would have to expect a continued increase in temps.
It sure takes some fancy footwork to downplay the solar input of the last half of the 20th Century. Isn’t it completely incorrect to say climate didn’t match solar activity for the last 50 – 60 years?
Here’s a neat, informative article on El Ninos, SOI, and Typhoons on Guam.
http://lumahai.soest.hawaii.edu/Enso/articles/2003%20Articles/2003MarPDN2.htm
Synopsis seems to be: El Nino brings rain, and Typhoons, followed by dry Spring. Maybe, Hurricanes the following year in the Atlantic.
When solar activity dropped a bit in the 80’s (compared to previous XX century activity, not to its 400 years of known history) , ENSO and PDO were in a warming phase. The sun influences climate but it is not the only thing that influences it. And we also have CO2, which has some influence as well (only much smaller than IPCC and its models consider). You can not play down the sun because of the late XX century. To do that you first need a good explanation for europeans Medieval Warming and Little Ice Age (I mean, something better than “just a local anomaly which happened to be coincidental with appropiate levels of solar activity”).
Okay. SC24 has begun. But what difference does it make?
The low activity level, compared to the last maximum, is continuing.
All signs seem to indicate the Earth is cooling, very lowly, but cooling.
CO2 is still rising. Which is the climate driver?
Those eras, Nylo, were in many places, not just Europe.
In the same way as an El Nino brings heavy rains to the Western US, it takes away the Monsoons for SE Asia. But, El Nino is short lived. PDO a little longer.
The eras, however are much longer, and then you have even longer time spans.
We shouldn’t be looking at such things as El Nino and PDO to explain the much longer eras, periods and epochs. They oscillate too quickly. Things that affect the Solar System environment, like the Sun, passing stars, comet swarms, Galactic clouds, spiral arms, etc. The Earth and it’s evirons do not exist in a vacuum.
Richard111 (23:42:25) :
Maybe a better question to ask is what things drive the multitude of climate cycles. Plural.
david alan (14:43:32) :
I am not a scientist.
Geoff Sherington:
I was, but I cannot understand why we are discussing sunspots. Do they form pixie dust and nucleate rainstorms?
J Gary Fox: Wrong. David Achibald has predicted exactly what is happening
Kum Dollison (16:49:05) :
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.
I see a different chronology. The cooling tropospheric temps of the last months causes a greater differential between ocean surface temp and air temp. The air is also drier, permitiing faster emission of outgoing longwave radiation from the ocean, with less humidity and water vapour to stop it by reflecting it back. This allows a momentum of upward moving warm water heated and stored during the run of high amplitude-short minimum cycles to build. So we see the SST’s have been rising even as the lower tropospheric temps have been falling over the last few months.
Then air temps will rise, but the momentum built up in the upwelling warm water will keep going for a while until the newly warmed air slows it down again. This is what will produce the modoki el nino spike. Afterwards, the lowered ocean heat content will reduce it’s warming of the atmosphere above it and there will be a downward step change in global temperature. This is also what happened after the 2006 el nino.
Bob Tisdale’s graph of OLR confirms this. When the sun was strong and temps were rising, el nino’s correlate with downspikes in OLR, but since solar cycle 23 started winding down, the el ninos have been able to lose a lot more heat to space.
http://i25.tinypic.com/2035ed.png
Jason S. (21:10:49) :
I have been watching proponents of AGW downplay solar activity. Eigil Friis-Christensen’s paper showed how much climate matched solar activity over the past 250 years up until early 1980’s. Then, according to warmers, we see temps climb while ’solar activity dropped’, and that seems to be where warmers say carbon took over.
Can it really be said that ’solar activity dropped’?
No. Although the maximum amplitudes have been falling since the 60’s the minima between cycles has been short, so overall TSI incident on the earth was rising, and the oceans have been storing the extra heat. It’s the oceans which set the temperature of the atmosphere, not co2. There is more heat capacity in the top 2.5m of ocean than in the entire atmosphere above it.
http://s630.photobucket.com/albums/uu21/stroller-2009/?action=view¤t=sst-nino-ssa.jpg
I haven’t run the calcs yet, but once I have, I’ll know what amplification factor is required to account for the extra heat inthe oceans. Then it’s up to Svensmark and friends.
Leif Svalgaard (17:41:19) :
In spite of how you interpret what Ken Tapping says it is plain that solar cycle 24 has begun:
Agreed. It’s just being weak and slow about it.
Please could you tell me where I can get a dataset of daily TSI covering 1993-2003.
Thanks
Gary Fox: Theodore Landscheidt also predicted the current solar low – by calculating the transfer of angular momentum from the giant planets to the sun’s spin – he predicted in the 1980s that the solar grand maximum would peak with cycle 22, and that cycle 23 would be about 30% down on 22, then 24 would be further down, moving with an 85% probability into a Maunder type minimum, and 15% Dalton type.
In a 2003 paper in Energy & Environment, he predicted that the 2002 El Nino would be the last significant ENSO event and that it would obscure the fall in ocean temperatures consequent on declining solar activity – until 2007, when global cooling would become apparent.
Landcheidt doesn’t get much credit – perhaps because he was not academic or institutional based physicist and he was also a competent astrologer (just like Newton and Galileo).
Roddy Baird and Peter Taylor.
Thank you both. You may find the discussion lower down this thread of interest on both ocean/air and SIM/precip.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/08/weve-never-had-frost-in-july/
Bill (17:10:14)
That’s just fine & dandy then, the Met Office KNOW EXACTLY how the sun works, & what effects it has on our planet’s climate, EXACTLY! Did they not write the script for the BBC doc on the Sun a while back now? – “NO ONE can explain WHAT EFFECT the POWER of the Sun has on OUR CLIMATE, but WHATEVER it is, IT’S ALREADY been overtaken by MANDMADE GLOBAL WARMING!” – Simples peoples! ‘A’ has an effect on ‘B’ but we don’t know what or how exactly, only roughly, yet mysteriously (through sophisticated technical processes, I expect) we know for a fact that ‘C’ overpowers ‘A’, regardless of the magnitude of either element. I don’t fink so! I am no scientist, but elementary physics suggests it foolhardy to rule it out of the equation just yet, unless for political objectivity!
BTW Peter Taylor;-)
I think they were both Astronomers as opposed to Astrologers? One talks sense, lives in the real world, & is modestly rewarded, the other talks bunkum, lives with the fairies, & earns a fortune! I know which one I’d rath…………………….. I think you’re going on a mysterious journey with a talk dark stanger! AtB
Wat’s likely to happen?
http://climaterealists.com/?id=3702
“Can it really be said that ’solar activity dropped’?”
Yes, it dropped from extremely strong sun cycle 22 to weaker 21, but 21st cycle is still stronger than majority of cycles since 1600s, see
http://blog.sme.sk/blog/560/195013/armaghcetssn.jpg
Remember that MWP was not caused by few extreme strong cycles, but many mediocre cycles not interrupted by weak cycles; the solar energy accumulated over times in the oceans.
http://blog.sme.sk/blog/560/195013/solanki2.jpg
Peter Taylor (03:07:13) : Thanks for that. This guy and his theory seem pretty remarkable. His theory is testable to the extend that it can make predictions that can be falsified. But from what I’m reading, his predictions have held up well. It is monumentally simple compared to the GIGO models used by the IPCC. Of course the climate is complex, but if the Sun is the driver of first order, that simplifies the task somewhat.
If any real climatologists are lurking about, what is your take on this?
http://bourabai.narod.ru/landscheidt/new-e.htm
Geoff Sherrington (01:57:17) :
I was, but I cannot understand why we are discussing sunspots. Do they form pixie dust and nucleate rainstorms?
The pixie dust is the galactic cosmic ray that seem to be stronger when TSI is low. Some how these GCRs can magically create clouds at low altitude (where they have a high albedo, and heat transfer from ground to space) where normal cloud condensation nuclei of which there is an abundance cannot.
CCN are abundant in the atmosphere and range from a few 10s per cubic centimeter over oceans and rural areas to tens of thousands per cubic centimeter in heavily urbanized areas. CCN are comprised of many natural and human made particles. They include dust, pollen, silicates (from soil), smoke particles and sea salt which is distributed into the atmosphere by oceanic wave action….With more condensation nuclei, the moisture available in a cloud is spread over more droplets. As a result, the droplets are smaller, the reflectivity of the cloud is increased, and precipitation may be delayed or reduced. Areas downstream from where the aerosols are produced can experience acid rain.
http://calipsooutreach.hamptonu.edu/pbl/pbl01-clouds.html
tallbloke (02:45:40) :
Can it really be said that ’solar activity dropped’?
No. Although the maximum amplitudes have been falling since the 60’s the minima between cycles has been short, so overall TSI incident on the earth was rising
Here is a plot to put this in perspective.
http://img172.imageshack.us/img172/5881/tsi.jpg
A small change to the average TSI would of couse show smaller variation!!!!!!
tallbloke (02:55:57) :
Please could you tell me where I can get a dataset of daily TSI covering 1993-2003.
http://www.leif.org/research/download-data.htm
Peter Taylor (03:07:13) :
he predicted in the 1980s that the solar grand maximum would peak with cycle 22, and that cycle 23 would be about 30% down on 22…
J. interdiscipl. Cycle Res., 1981, vol. 12, number 1, pp. 3-19.
“ABSTRACT. The secular cycle of solar activity […] The next minimum in the 79-year cycle will occur in 1990. It will be more pronounced than the minimum in 1811.”
Ed Fix (18:06:20) :
Aw, c’mon. Quit picking on the poor sun. It’s trying as hard as it can to sprout spots!
Sunspot sprouts are as anemic as economic green shoots.
tallbloke (02:55:57) :
Please could you tell me where I can get a dataset of daily TSI covering 1993-2003.
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/data/tsi_data.htm
tallbloke – Thanks. I missed that. It’s good to know better minds are already on the job 🙂