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.
If I were a betting man I’d say cycle 24 started more than a month ago. The bigger picture may involve solar changes different in type from recent solar cycles or perhaps of opposite sign. So the solar guys are in a wonderful position to observe and theorize and perhaps advance our knowledge.
bill (06:17:41) :
Geoff Sherrington (01:57:17) :
“I was, but I cannot understand why we are discussing sunspots. Do they form pixie dust and nucleate rainstorms?”
Take a look at the noctilucent cloud story over at SpaceWeather.com right now:
http://www.spaceweather.com/
“NOCTILUCENT STORM: Last night, after a two week intermission, noctilucent clouds returned to Europe in force. “It was one of the best displays of the summer,” reports Jan Koeman of Kloetinge, The Netherlands. “The beautiful rippling structure of the electric-blue clouds reminded me of the skin of a Great Blue Whale!” He took this picture using a Nikon D300:
Similar reports poured in from Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Belgium, Scotland, Ireland, England and France. “They were so bright I could see them from one of the most light-polluted places one could imagine–the Brussels Ringway,” says Philippe Mollet, who made a movie of the clouds gliding over the urban heart of Belgium.
2009 has been a good year for noctilucent clouds–and that’s no surprise. Noctilucent clouds almost always surge during years of solar minimum. No one fully understands why, but here is a popular idea: Low solar activity allows the upper atmosphere to cool, promoting the formation of ice crystals that make up the clouds. Browse the gallery for observing tips and more snapshots from July 12th and 13th:
http://www.spaceweather.com/nlcs/images2009/12jul09/Jan-Koeman1.jpg?PHPSESSID=1hsbgpc1d0aerneemb261m59t5 ”
Yes, it appears that when the big ball of fire belches less fire there is an increase in “pixie dust” that appears to facilitate cloud formation and may impact Earth’s climate.
Leif, I haven’t seen any info on solar wind recently. Do you have a good chart on this? Has solar wind picked up as Cycle 24 has begun?
Leif Svalgaard (06:37:14) :
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
Thanks Leif, and Tim Clark too.
I notice TSI isn’t correlating with sunspots as well as it was, any comment on that?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/pmod/mean:3/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1979/scale:0.006/offset:1365.5
There’s a range of around 1.7W in the last 6 years. Seems a bit more variable than it used to be. Do you think significantly lower TSI might be a feature of long minima?
bill (06:17:41) : So the Sun varies 0.07% compared to the CO2 concentration of 0.04%. Looks like the Sun wins 🙂
Roddy Baird (07:32:09) :
tallbloke – Thanks. I missed that. It’s good to know better minds are already on the job
Your sound intuition, logical reasoning and clear expression were a joy to read. Grab your calculator, pull up a spare polar bear and join us.
Why the huge difference in sunspot numbers in these two NGDC.NOAA sites.
ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/STP/SOLAR_DATA/SUNSPOT_NUMBERS/MONTHLY
ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/STP/SOLAR_DATA/SUNSPOT_NUMBERS/AMERICAN_NUMBERS/2009
A curios amateur.
tallbloke (08:32:14) :
I notice TSI isn’t correlating with sunspots as well as it was, any comment on that?
Two reasons [and I have commented on those before]:
1) recent PMOD is wrongly calibrated
2) Recent Sunspot numbers are also wrong.
Leif Svalgaard (09:09:42) :
tallbloke (08:32:14) :
I notice TSI isn’t correlating with sunspots as well as it was, any comment on that?
Two reasons [and I have commented on those before]:
1) recent PMOD is wrongly calibrated
2) Recent Sunspot numbers are also wrong.
I haven’t managed to keep up to speed aon all the solar threads. I know there’s been a lot of discussion about over counting pores as sunspots so I guess the count should be lower. What about the PMOD though? What do you think is wrong with the calibration and is it too low in your opinion?
Jim (08:36:00) :
bill (06:17:41) : So the Sun varies 0.07% compared to the CO2 concentration of 0.04%. Looks like the Sun wins 🙂
the sun intensity is likely to remain within your figure of .07%. CO2 is not limited in such a manner. (I have not checked your figures!)
tallbloke (09:26:34) :
What about the PMOD though? What do you think is wrong with the calibration and is it too low in your opinion?
PMOD is too low now. Comparison with SORCE/TIM showed that PMOD was drifting lower since 2003. Claus Froehlich [in charge of PMOD] acknowledges this [in emails to me] and knows that the calibration is wrong. He has tried to correct it, but the correction was also wrong, so the bottom line is that PMOD is suspect. This whole topic is too large to discuss in a short comment, but I might do another article on this, although I’m waiting for Claus to figure out what went wrong.
To wet your appetite, here are some excepts from our email exchanges:
Leif: Apr.14, 2009: I notice a profound change. Before the difference between PMOD and SORCE was decreasing by 0.0177 W/m2 per year, now the decrease is a lot smaller 0.0036 W/m2. A year ago the decrease was 0.0186 W/m2 per year.
2009/4/14 Claus Fröhlich :
Yes, you may have noticed that the VIRGO data are now Version 6.002 and I changed an internal correction – I did this already in SF [at AGU]. A few years ago I found a linear trend between the corrected PMO6V and DIARAD time series and allocated it to DIARAD. At SF I realized that this was probably wrong and remembered also that the re-analysis I started 2 years ago and never completed showed that the corrections of PMO6V-B (the less exposed backup) was with the early increase as determined for PMO6V-A too much changing – so I attributed the trend to PMO6V and obviously got a smaller change relative to TIM, which was a kind of initiator of this whole action.
My reply:
Claus, a detailed comparison of SORCE and PMOD composite, shows good agreement in the details [not in trend] until 2008.6, but then PMOD becomes much more erratic, not in keeping with the dead quiet the Sun has been the past nine months:
http://www.leif.org/research/Comparison%20SORCE%20PMOD%20since%202008.png
Claus: From that time on we have a problem with DIARAD I have not yet solved, but need to look into in much more detail – for the moment I used a simple correction, which may not be correct.
—-
Bottom line: let Claus correct his calibration before we jump to any conclusions.
Leif Svalgaard (10:49:03) :
tallbloke (09:26:34) :
What about the PMOD though? What do you think is wrong with the calibration and is it too low in your opinion?
PMOD is too low now. Comparison with SORCE/TIM showed that PMOD was drifting lower since 2003. Claus Froehlich [in charge of PMOD] acknowledges this [in emails to me] and knows that the calibration is wrong.
Leif, thanks for the detail. The correlation between sunspot numbers and TSI is very good until 2000, not long after the Acrimsat took over the portege of the sensors. Was the sun doing anything different, or has Claus generally had more problems with the Acrimsat mounted equipment than he did with the previous satellite platforms?
tallbloke (02:36:13) : 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.
I would only add that you left off ozone. This map of present conditions:
http://exp-studies.tor.ec.gc.ca/e/ozone/Curr_allmap_g.htm
currently shows fairly low levels all over the globe (nothing over 400 range, and large areas of the globe at 300 units or less; on a scale that ranges up to 625) while the anomaly map further down shows only one small area of over 10%+, the tropics at basically normal, and the poles at significantly low levels ( -30% at the S. Pole area).
Ozone is the only gas plugging the 9 to 10 micrometer “window” in the IR emissivity to any significant degree. It’s gone low, and the IR is leaving at the poles. Then the cold polar winds bring me The Big Blue Blob 😉
At least, that’s my working theory on ozone …
Yeah, it’s still a work in progress…
Oh, and on the issue of the planets causing some of this:
There is a neat “toy” that is basically a ball with a gyro in side of it.
http://www.powerballs.com/works.php?m=Works
You bob it up and down while twisting your wrist and the gyro spins up, eventually to the point of providing significant force against your hands and arms. There is also a paper being published in Russian that says that the PDO and similar ocean currents correlate with changes in the length of day. My speculation would be that something similar to the “toy” is going on.
As the planets and sun rotate around the combined center of mass and bob up and down out of the plain of the ecliptic and have precession going on, this causes a very small change of rotation rate that slops the ocean around and gives us the PDO flip, et. al. It all fits together nicely.
One Small Problem:
I’ve not been able to find any technical description of the exact order of motion that causes a gyro to spin up. Yeah, I can find the general gyro formulas, but stare at them as I might, I don’t see how to work them to make the gyro spin up from bobbing it around, yet that clearly does happen (existence proof of the “toy”). So I can’t get a “sanity check” by asking “does the earth move in that pattern, even if just a little bit?”. So this whole thing could be proven by a good fit of the formulas to the actual planetary motion, or shot down by a failure to fit; and I can’t see how to start cutting the clutter to see the answer. Never did like angular momentum problems… probably ought to have paid more attention in physics class 😉
If someone with better AM and gyroscope skills than mine can show this is a broken thought, I’d greatly appreciate the opportunity to let go of it. As it is, I can see the Gyro Spin Up Shiny Thing, but not make it go away, nor welcome it in… I suspect that there is something like a physical restraining of the poles of the gyro in the toy that does not hold for the planet that lets the toy spin up, but I just can’t prove it. Heck, I can’t even see how bobbing it around can change the spin rate… Sigh.
tallbloke (11:23:23) :
Leif, thanks for the detail. The correlation between sunspot numbers and TSI is very good until 2000, not long after the Acrimsat took over the portege of the sensors. Was the sun doing anything different, or has Claus generally had more problems with the Acrimsat mounted equipment than he did with the previous satellite platforms?
Too early to speculate. Let him correct his data first.
I have a question – a very, very naive question perhaps….
Does the Sun ever show signs of explosive sun spots? What I mean is, could the activity be building “sub surface” like a volcano for example? I know its a star, without a crust etc, but I was curious if the sunspot energy could be building and not be seen (because we’re not looking for it correctly).
I think the answer is probably no – sunspots don’t build and then “explode” – but I was curious.
“”” 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. “””
And just who is it that would be stopping the surface heat from being dissipated. Certainly the warmer (hypothesized) surface water would result in increased conduction to the atmosphere; it would also contribute to increased evaporative cooling from the surface;a dn finally, nobody is going to stop that warmer surface water from radiating at an increased rate.
So now where again is the blackage in the system ?
Chris Taylor (12:04:18) :
I think the answer is probably no – sunspots don’t build and then “explode” – but I was curious.
Sunspots do not explode, but the magnetic field in them and above them can be twisted up by motions of the solar plasma, and a twisted magnetic field can and does explode. A solar flare results.
The Coriolis and trade winds are connected. When trade winds die down or rev up, I wonder of the Coriolis has changed in some way to set this up. Or is this another example of one thing causing the other to begin and then the affect continues the cause?
Magnus
As a direct descendant (possibly) of King Canute, can I just point out that he was demonstrating that he didn’t have the power to halt the tides. Entirely the opposite of the hubris that is frequently attributed to him.
E.M.Smith (11:42:04) :
There is also a paper being published in Russian that says that the PDO and similar ocean currents correlate with changes in the length of day. My speculation would be that something similar to the “toy” is going on.
I’ve not been able to find any technical description of the exact order of motion that causes a gyro to spin up.
Tentative at this stage, but Paul Vaughan is doing interesting work with wavelet analysis on the chandler wobble, and has provided links to his graphs, and to lot’s of LOD and AAM related papers. There’s even a mention of the solar system b*#yc@ntre but mums the word.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/08/weve-never-had-frost-in-july/
towards bottom of thread.
Jim (06:00:16) :
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
I am no climatologist, but the hypothesis of spin orbit coupling has been covered extensively here and elsewhere. As you say, his theory is testable. It can be tested against
standard physical laws (gravity), and if you do that, it fails. See http://arnholm.org/astro/sun/sc24/sim1/
The long thread about that issue: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/21/the-sun-double-blankety-blank-quiet/
We may well be looking at a deep solar minimum like some have predicted. But if it happens, the mechanism to trigger it must be something else than spin orbit coupling.
I see we’re already back to zero sunspots:
http://www2.nict.go.jp/y/y223/sept/swcenter/sunspot.html
Surprise, or no surprise?
Pamela Gray (12:55:48) :
“The Coriolis and trade winds are connected. When trade winds die down or rev up, I wonder of the Coriolis has changed in some way to set this up. Or is this another example of one thing causing the other to begin and then the affect continues the cause?”
The Coriolis Effect is probably one of the worst taught phenomena in science. It is solely due to the spinning of the earth. Consider the earth and air at the equator. They travel the entire circumference of the earth west to east as the earth makes one full rotation – a speed that’s better that a thousand miles every hour. At the other extreme, the air/earth at the poles travel essentially zero as the earth rotates. So when air at a lower latitute (e.g., equator) moves to a higher latitude, it is traveling west to east faster than the air/earth at that higher latitude. So you have a west-to-east wind. Vice versa if the air is moving from a higher latitude to a lower one.
So unless the speed of earth’s rotation changes, then there is no change in the Coriolis.
If the trade winds die down, it is simply an indicator of a smaller north/south movement of air.
I was criticized for saying that, “No expert predicted the late start of Cycle 24 or the deep quiet phase of the sun in all measurable energies.”
That’s fair. Since I haven’t done a exhaustive review all solar scientists and their predictions, I should have been clearer and limited it to the “usual suspects” of the NASA and NOAA scientists who have been in the forefront of “official” predictions. They have been described by NOAA as, “an international panel of experts led by NOAA and sponsored by NASA”
Peter Taylor noted in his posting that
“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 …”
I don’t think Landscheidt gets much credit … or deserves much credit for his predictions … since he made a ton of them using both astrology methods and mathematical analysis. The proven method of being accurate in forecasting is: Predict frequently.
If you believe in astrology and mysticism read Landscheidt many strange predictions using the Golden Ratio and Golden Section in the link below.
http://bourabai.narod.ru/landscheidt/consider.htm
Paul Jose in 1965 published a detailed analysis of the Sun-Jupiter Angular Momentum and the sunspot relationship using mathematic and no mysticism. This is a seminal work using recently available powerful computers to precisely demonstrate the relationship. I wonder how much the Mystic borrowed from Jose?
“Sun’s Motion and Sunspots” Paul Jose
The Astronomical Journal
Vol 10 Num 1 April 1965
Jose article is available at:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/n3lm39
For a non-mathematician I found two articles that were very helpful in helping me understand the effects of Angular Momentum and the Sun – Planets connection.
The first puts AM into very understandable terms.
“What figure-skaters, planets, and neutron stars have in common”
TinyURL.com/lkmjbk
The second is a comprehensive 2008 review of past work in this area and updates and discusses possible mechanisms of Solar System Angular Momentum. It also gives proper credit to pioneer Paul Jose.
“Does Spin Orbit Coupling Between the Sun and Jovian Planets Govern the Solar Cycle?”
Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, 2008, 25, 85–93
http://tinyurl.com/ncuj9k
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.)
—
Found a copy of that 1998 Solar Cycle 23-24 graph a few days ago: Predicting the minimum in 2006, and (now) in mid-2009 we “should have be” ramping well up towards the inflection point. Instead? One single, solo, isolated stable big spot the entire first half of the year.
Just The Facts (08:28:01) : 13 07
Pixie dust.
Sunspot counts correlate with some past global climate measurements.
GHG can be shown to have some plausible global climate effects.
Beware the illogical trap.