Leif Svalgaard writes:
Some speculation that solar cycle 25 has already begun:
http://xrt.cfa.harvard.edu/resources/pubs/savc0707.pdf
Graph source: NASA News
This would be stunning, because it suggests that the sun has skipped a solar cycle (#24) . Researchers, three from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the other from Marshall Space Flight Center-NASA, have published a paper that suggests this possibility.
Does a polar coronal hole’s flux emergence follow a Hale-like law?
A. Savcheva1, J.W. Cirtain2, E.E. DeLuca1, L. Golub1
ABSTRACT
Recent increases in spatial and temporal resolution for solar telescopes sensitive to EUV and X-ray radiation have revealed the prevalence of transient jet events in polar coronal holes. Using data collected by the X-Ray Telescope on Hinode, Savcheva et al. (2007) confirmed the observation, made first by the Soft X-ray Telescope on Yohkoh, that some jets exhibit a motion transverse to the jet outflow direction.
The velocity of this transverse motion is, on average, 20 kms−1. The direction of the transverse motion, in combination with the standard reconnection model for jet production (e.g. Shibata et al. 1992), reflects the magnetic polarity orientation of the ephemeral active region at the base of the jet. From this signature, we find that during the present minimum phase of the solar cycle the jet-base ephemeral active regions in the polar coronal holes had a preferred east-west direction, and that this direction reversed during the cycle’s progression through minimum.
In late 2006 and early 2007, the preferred direction was that of the active regions of the coming sunspot cycle (Cycle 24), but in late 2008 and early 2009 the preferred direction has been that of the active regions of sunspot cycle 25. These findings are consistent with the results of Wilson et al. (1988) that there is a high latitude expansion of the solar activity
cycle.
Full paper here:
http://xrt.cfa.harvard.edu/resources/pubs/savc0707.pdf
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possibly OT,
but somehow I did remember the sound of “Silent Running” here.
Okay, it was a pretty good theme for the nowadays “warmingistas”,
nevertheless, the music was good. Do still like Joan Baez, even when
there are worlds between her opinion and my opinion now.
The definitive interpretation:
can we be sure that the sun isn’t pregnant?
Re Paul Vaughn’s comment and link to a study about cycles just before the Dalton Minimum
Going to the Usoskin et al (2009) paper Paul references (which may be the same paper Ellie in Belfast notes), there is this sentence in the conclusions section:
“Note also that some physical dynamo models even predict the existence of cycles of small amplitude and short duration near a grand minimum.”
Thus it appears possible that a VERY short cycle is possible without having the short cycle identified with high temperatures.
It is also — speculation on my part, what do you think, Lief? — that a very short cycle might PRECEDE the cooler period, if I understand the Usoskin et al paper correctly?
If the moderators at RC don’t allow your rebuttal through, please post your response here.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/08/still-not-convincing/#more-728
Isn’t this convenient! So let me try to understand if we continue to have blank sunspot days currently (21) with a total of 677 for SC24 than all future blank days will start at 1? What am I missing. Seems that all the geniuses who have continually pushed SC24 out 6 months every 3 months now can start from scratch. I don’t understand the logic and it seems to easy for all the people who have looked so bad on forecasting SC24.
Someone, please answer this, are we in a minimum or does that conveniently go away too?.
Well, obviously something rather bizzare(and not understood) is occuring.
Funny how nature, not man, always “bats last”.
Interesting times indeed!
(1) Tuning fork or (2) ‘relaxation’ (Neon bulb fired Resistor-Capacitor) oscillator?
Which oscillator mechansim better describes the sunspot (et al) perdocity action of the sun – (1) or (2) above?
Background: (1) A Tuning fork’s freqeuncy is quite well defined by the material and predominantly the length in one particular dimension, and attempts to ‘pull’ it result in appearant lower Q (energy loss per cycle) without much real success. The tuning fork oscillator’s output is a fairly pure sinusoid.
(2) A relaxation oscillator, on the other hand can be made to ‘fire’ prematurely quite easily; this is the type of ‘oscillator’ which results in a sawtooth output with the ‘firing’ being somewhat precisely undetermined ‘up the ramp’ (it is going to ‘fire’ as some point, as the gas in the Neon tube/bulb ionizes at some point and does so in an avalanche effect at those last nanoseconds).
With that as the background, is there at the root of this, some aspect of a nuclear mechanism at work along the lines of a relaxation oscillator that determines the period of sun spot et al activity of old sol?
If so – (2) above- this would explain a lot and allow for much shorter cycles
(as opposed to longer cycles or rigidly-fixed cycles which is not so easy to obtain with a relaxation osc or a tuning fork osc) …
.
.
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DocMartyn (15:48:49) :
can we be sure that the sun isn’t pregnant?
Nope, we cannot. I see that black spot on Jupiter’s surface very strange. I don’t think it was a comet colliding with the giant planet. The spot is so irregular that it portrays a collision with a solar ejection of very hot material at speeds close, equal or exceeding the speed of sound.
I thought the paper was very badly written and the speculation was based on less than three years of observations! The data used was very sparse (see Figure 1 at the end of the document).
Colour me unimpressed.
Phillip Bratby (14:07:39) :
I don’t see any health warning in the paper that this is all speculation based on very little data?
The paper ends: “We expect to extend this result through long-term observations of the solar polar coronal holes to increase the statistical certainty of this result.”
Admitting that it is now low. Also, note that they find some support for Wilson’s [and other’s] idea of an extended solar cycle [22 years long], so that there does not need to be a ‘missed’ cycle. Suppose that every cycle is 22 years long and that cycle 23 really began in 1987 and is now ending, and that cycle 24 really began in 1997, and cycle 25 has now begun, then there are no missed or skipped cycles. It is already accepted by most solar physicists that there is an extended solar cycle at least 17 years long, so the jump to 22 is not so large…
But I don’t want to spoil the fun watching all the ‘I told you so’ experts come out of the woodwork 🙂
Lol @ur momisugly DocMartyn
If you did have jets running one way, then the jets started running the other way, it would seem to me that an area of great turbulence would be created. Eventually, the opposing residual motion would be consumed and things would go with the new flow.
In the meantime, it’s like a big drag brake, a ship at sea going into emergency reverse (cavitating), or swimming upstream. Progress is painful.
Opposing flows would be responsible for highly twisted spots, and spots that roll very fast over a days time.
Now it’s time to go read the afternoon solar news posted above.
The Sun is a fiip-flopper.
This article that was published today in the Astrophysical Journal is seminal. The fact of detecting a super small cycle preceeding a grand minimun suggests where we are at this moment if cycle 24 fails to meet our expectations.
But not to worry, as others have said, the sun plays no part in climate change on earth. The oceans just do their flips and drive climate here. It is just an illusion that temperatures were colder than today in the Maunder and Dalton minimums, and if they were colder it wasn’t because of the sun (This is sarcasm). If you start to feel colder in the years to come, Mr. Gore will just change his statistics to show that you are really warmer.
Models are intellectual constructs, not necessarily computer code, that enable us to comprehend external observations. When we have observations that don’t fit the nmodels, we must discard the model and observe more closely.
In response to someone else, I think the 11 year cycles are defined by the direction of the solar magnetic dipole – direction of the magnetic poles; they do switch N-S every 11 years.
I don’t think these ephemera will dictate the definition of solar cycles.
They sure are interesting observations, though I suspect no one yet understands them. Let’s come back to this question in 500 years.
The paper speculates that they find support for Wilson’s ‘extended cycle”. Here is what that critter looks like:
http://www.leif.org/research/Extended-Cycle.png
[From Wilson’s book: solar and Stellar Activity Cycles ISBN 0.521-54821-7]
Vinny, if you follow the daily styereo images, you will see that there are no sunspots “coming around the bend” for at least another three days.
Hey, women skip the odd cycle all the time and remain incandescent… Chill 🙂
The cycle that comes after cycle 23 is obviously cycle 24.
It now seems possible that 2 cycles can have the same magnetic polarity.
That would mean that the accepted idea that the sun changes magnetic polarity once in a minimum is dead. It now seems the sun can change polarity 2 times, and who know how many more.
A ‘lost cycle’ is a non-existing thing, it isn’t misplaced somewhere, it isn’t there. The term ‘lost cycle’ would just mean that solar scientists are hanging on to an old idea that has been disproved.
However rare this may be, we don’t know about the magnetic polarity of many past cycles, so it may have happened before.
However it works out. It is great fun.
Robert Wood (16:34:56) :
Vinny, if you follow the daily styereo images, you will see that there are no sunspots “coming around the bend” for at least another three days.
14 days according to SpaceWeather:
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/data.html
It must be true because we already have a SolarCycle25 web site up and running!
http://solarcycle25.com/
Actually could it be that there is more than we think we have figured out since so few cycles have actually been followed and watched. Cycles within cycles, long cycles, short cycles, missing cycles, cycles overlaping others, etc. Are things a little more complex than our self taught math and almost blind observation has accounted for. Hey, I’m not a scientist, I hope you get the idea what I’m trying to say.
What do they say, just when you think you have it all figured out, they change the rules!,,,,, Something like that.
Very hesitantly – as in the drowning man in water out of his depth – can’t we just have a violation of the odd-even cycle and leave the number sequence intact – a possibility which from imperfect memory and understanding might have been sugested by Duhau and de Jager recently. That would not seem to conflict with Dr. Svalgaard’s report of underlying extended cycles but be just one way of reporting the present observations.
Robin Kool (16:51:20) :
The cycle that comes after cycle 23 is obviously cycle 24.
It now seems possible that 2 cycles can have the same magnetic polarity.
that is not what they report. The report that there are magnetic regions in the polar caps with polarity different from cycle 24, i.e. what we would expect for SC25 and what we had for SC23. So, yes, in a sense, 2 cycles [23 and 25] can have the same polarity, although that was probably not what you meant.
Leif Svalgaard (17:09:33):
The report that there are magnetic regions in the polar caps with polarity different from cycle 24, i.e. what we would expect for SC25 and what we had for SC23.
Leif… Is that possible in a ball made of pure incandescent gases? Definitely, there is something wrong in your model.
Are they certain of exactly when the reversal occured?
It’s somewhat close to the period between the double-hump maxima of SC22 & SC23 divided by two. A reversal of a temporal nature.
Not saying it’s a fit, just looking for how this finding sits with the flow of things.
Who knows, the thing may revert back to SC24 polarity and the clock is set to zero. Nice subject for a Saturday.