At the risk of triggering a new sunspot by talking about it, I’ll cautiously mention that by GMT time midnight tomorrow, August 10th, we will possibly have a 30 day stretch of no sunspots at a time when cycle 24 has been forecast by many to be well underway. Here is the most recent (and auto updating) SOHO MDI image of the sun:
Spotless Days Count
(updated data from Spaceweather.com)
Current Stretch: 29 days
2009 total: 171 days (78%)
Since 2004: 682 days
Typical Solar Min: 485 days
Here is the latest data from NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center:
:Product: Daily Solar Data DSD.txt :Issued: 0225 UT 09 Aug 2009 # # Prepared by the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, NOAA, Space Weather Prediction Center # Please send comments and suggestions to SWPC.Webmaster@noaa.gov # # Last 30 Days Daily Solar Data # # Sunspot Stanford GOES10 # Radio SESC Area Solar X-Ray ------ Flares ------ # Flux Sunspot 10E-6 New Mean Bkgd X-Ray Optical # Date 10.7cm Number Hemis. Regions Field Flux C M X S 1 2 3 #--------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2009 07 10 68 13 60 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 07 11 68 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 07 12 68 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 07 13 67 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 07 14 67 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 07 15 67 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 07 16 67 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 07 17 66 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 07 18 67 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 07 19 68 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 07 20 68 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 07 21 68 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 07 22 68 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 07 23 68 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 07 24 68 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 07 25 69 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 07 26 68 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 07 27 68 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 07 28 69 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 07 29 68 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 07 30 68 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 07 31 69 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 08 01 68 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 08 02 68 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 08 03 67 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 08 04 66 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 08 05 66 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 08 06 67 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 08 07 68 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2009 08 08 67 0 0 0 -999 A0.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
While it is possible that we’ll see a 30 day stretch of days with no sunspots, we have yet to complete a calendar month without a sunspot.
A year ago in August 2008, we initially had completed a sunspotless calendar month. But, as fate would have it, that distinction was snatched away at the very last moment by the folks in Belgium at SIDC based on one sketch of a plage cum sunspeck from Catainia observatory in Italy.
As Carly Simon once fabulously sung:
I know nothing stays the same
But if youre willing to play the game
Its coming around again
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rbateman (22:17:36) :
Yeah, maybe 95% in the 60’s, but it blows up going either direction from there.
i.e. – it changes. Who would have guessed that it’s dynamic?
It may have been useful 30 years ago. Now it runs away from that and grows very noisy.
The ratio becomes noisy when SSN becomes small, at every minimum, not just now. There was an equally good correlation between SSM [can I call it SSA from now on] and F10.7 and between SSN and F10.7 up to about 1990. Both SSA and F10.7 now begin to deviate from this correlation. My hunch is that this is due the the L&P effect. The recent several years the SSN is too small. Somewhat contradictory to the the accusation that SIDC overcounts the specks. Independent indication of the undercount can be found here: http://www.leif.org/research/Alfvenic%20Mach%20number%20variation.pdf
Roddy Baird (22:31:26) :
Cycles that may play out over much greater lengths of time, so yes, over 1 million years it all gets smeared out but over 50 000 years you get…
These may be there, but since we cannot readily detect them, I don’t worry about them right now.
Leif Svalgaard (08:26:31) :
Consider this thought experiment: We settle the Sun in at its minimum TSI, say 1365, constantly for a thousand years .. Then we increase TSI to 1366.5 and keep it there for another thousand years. The question we now ask is what will be the temperature increase due to this increase of TSI. My answer is 0.07 degrees.
How on Earth do you get this figure of 0.07 degrees?
Also TSI varies by much more than just 1.5 W/m^2. I plotted the TSI from 01/12/2007 to 29/07/2009.
The plot is an almost perfect sinusoidal curve (now why should this be so?) and the TSI varies from 1407.76 W/m^2 around the 5th of January to 1316.54 W/m^2 around the 5th of July. A difference of 91.22 W/m^2.
Now why should this be so? Let me guess – due to our elliptical orbit? we are closest to the Sun on the 5th of Jan and farthest on the 5th of July?
This should make our northern winters milder and southern summers warmer and our northern summers cooler and our southern winters cooler. And sure enough its cold down here and I just heard from my friend in Newcastle, Australia, north of Sydney – its chilly there.
You can call it SSA.
I just grabbed the 1st acronym that came to mind.
How far back does the measurement of umbral magnetic go?
There is very bad scatter at 1900.
I updated to include Pulkovo’s Extension to the Greenwich System.
The heart of SC7 & 11 may be due to insufficient data or not yet measured, backfilled. Nature abhors straight lines. The others look real as well as the unique minimums.
Mike M (12:11:37) :
Just musing here… I’m a believer of ancient ‘knowledge’ locked into the genetics of all living things. Considering how long plant DNA has been around, I noticed that all the pine trees in my region of New England are producing a bumper crop of pine cones this year and wonder why are they doing it?
Folk wisdom in Greece says that when there are a lot of pine cones the winter will be severe. It is convenient, because they were used a lot for starting the fire in the fireplaces. I think this year’s crop in my area is normal.
@Leif
As someone who has been enamored of the “Solar Rotation Shiny Thing” as causing warming / cooling I have to say:
I now think your assertion that not much has changed with the weather due to the sun is true (at least through the data as of 2008).
I’ve taken the GHCN data and looked at the “global warming signal” in the data via a couple of methods. There is a strong seasonal signal that can NOT be a function of solar processes.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/co2-takes-summers-off/
While it can not be a function of CO2 either, the fact is that neither the sun nor CO2 “has what it takes” to explain the data.
I’ve put up the code I used to do this study (it is in FORTRAN, but I can make a C translation if folks need it) and it does not depend on GIStemp, only on the GHCN data set (freely downloadable).
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/will-the-good-ghcn-stations-please-stand-up/
If you have any interest in having this run at your site, let me know on my blog. I’m about 30 minutes away from Stanford and I will happily provide a free porting service to make any of this code (or GIStemp for that matter) run on a box of your choosing as long as it runs some *nix port. (“bigendian” is needed at this point if you want the SST map added in).
As someone who has spent more of your time than I can ever repay on “the sun did it”, the least I can do is provide the tools to show “the sun didn’t do it, it was the thermometer count / locations.”
Thank you for your patience, for your teaching, and for your guidance.
E. Michael Smith
rbateman (00:10:35) :
How far back does the measurement of umbral magnetic go?
About to 1917
There is very bad scatter at 1900.
Because SSN was so small.
The heart of SC7 & 11 may be due to insufficient data or not yet measured, backfilled. Nature abhors straight lines. The others look real as well as the unique minimums.
So you discovered an ugly truth: when there is no data, make some up. The SSA was ‘reconstructed’ from the SSN at times.
” My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the Sun”
—Wm Shakespeare
Old Sol’s in a terrible funk!
How low has the solar flux sunk!
It seems like an age
Since that disc showed a plage–
It’s as bare as the pate of a monk!
The GONG Big Bear Magnetogram image from 08/11 14:38 UTC shows a Solar Cycle 23 small micro-signature near the equator. No spots though.
The wait continues…
Leif Svalgaard (00:30:52) :
Since the oceans [and the soil] can hold a large amount of heat any changes in the input will be dampened out and the output will be rather constant [Think of the constant temperature of a deep cave]. The output is what determines the temperature.
Specific heat of water = 4186 joules per kilogram and 70% of earth’s surface.
Specific heat of dry soil = 465 joules per kilogram and 30% of earth’s surface or
Specific heat of wet soil = 581 joules per kilogram
So, roughly 95% of “stored energy” is in the oceans.
“When was the solar minimum..”
Well, if we are on our way into a 50 year Maunder like minimum, a specific minimum date is perhaps not so important. If..
A Glass Esq.
How I delight in such lttle rhymes and ditties.
And yes I used to have Mistress whose eyes were nothing like the Sun but rather the deepest blue of the oceans. She is no more and I regret her much.
The world has changed and in its busyness Academia has neither use nor even the education for such charming little diversions.
As for what is going on the Sun ask the Sun. If there is one thing I am sure of it is that a set of Tarot cards will predict the future of the current solar funk quite as well as the elaborate mathematical solar dances of the many so called experts: here I except really serious solar physicists because being very wise, as all good Natural Philosophers are, they never make predictions, especially about the future.
Kindest Regards.
“When was the solar minimum..”
Well like Leif said there are many minimums…
If you are referring to international sunspot minimum, the candidate for that is December 2008… for now!
Dalton Minimum type is quite likely to occur now, Maunder on the other hand…hmm Not likely according to consensus… (yes, consensus!)
Although, the Bubonic Plague apparently did break out in China just before the Maunder Minimum… Oh and now it has broken out in China again… Coincidence?
Props to Arthur Glass for his solar poetry!
Wonderful to read amongst all the technical stuff.
Thanks!
Probably coincidence yes.
Not least because if you are referring to the Black Death which killed some 30% of the world’s population, greater proportionally in Europe where morbidity was probably closer to 50%, within a few years then that was some 300 years before the Maunder minimum.
It’s origins, probably from India or Central Asia as well as it’s exact nature, probably Bubonicus, but that is not certain, are still hotly debated.
But we are fairly sure that it was the Plague which continued to ravage Europe with outbreaks every decade or two but suddenly died out at the beginning of or during the Maunder minimum, one of the last great outbreaks being in London in 1665.
It has often been suggested that the great fire of London, 1666, destroyed the reservoir of infection but in fact it had virtually disappeared from all Europe by around 1700.
It has never come back. We don’t really know why.
Bubonicus still does turn up now and again especially in Asia but modern antibiotics if given in time are very effective at treating it.
And if it really was the Black Death either it has lost most of it’s virulence or modern people are largely immune to it. Or both.
Which puts swine flu in its place, mere toytown stuff. Even the Spanish flu, so called because it was first identified in Spain, only managed to kill some 20 million people just after the first world war: whereas with it’s first outbreakthe Black Death killed some 150 million people around the world in a few years and perhaps as many again in the next three hundred years.
And there weren’t as many people around as there are now. As far as we can tell it was the most devastating pandemic in human history.
And they worry about AGW. Some people have no sense of proportion.
Kindest Regards.
Dear E.M. Smith, another convert to the “It ain’t the Sun stupid” crowd. Welcome aboard.
“Survior Immunity” is definitely a factor, but it is probably not the only thing: Certainly, after the victims died, the remainder were resistant to the Black Death. But why the two different forms? (One apparently by flea bites with slow-building lesions, one by air or airborne (some quick-acting) contagion?)
Why were the children and grandchildren of the original surviors … etc also almost all immune? Where did the disease “go” after the Middle Ages?
The explanation seems two “quick and simple” and too limited in time – if rat-carried fleas were the cause, these rats and fleas were present long before the first ships came in with the Plague from the east. Why was it not so deadly in the east? There aren’t 1/3 of the populations killers before the Middle Ages, but trade had been crossing the plains since the Roman and Greel times.
E.M.Smith (01:30:49) : How can you say the sun didnt do it?
If I understand your “CO2 takes summers off” the winters have got milder (less cold or warmer if you wish), since 1880? The summers if anything slightly cooler?
Today the closest point to the Sun (perihelion) falls on the 5/6th of Jan and the furthest on the 5/6th of July. The difference of the TSI due to this distance is 91.22 W/m^2.
In 1880 perihelion would have been on the 15th of December and aphelion on the 15th of June. So today in the Northern hemisphere Jan should be a little warmer and July a little cooler than 1880. Do these show in the records?
PS the same should apply to August
Pamela Gray (17:31:45) :
Dear E.M. Smith, another convert to the “It ain’t the Sun stupid” crowd. Welcome aboard.
Smarter thinking would say “It aint the TSI component stupid”
That’s 32 spotless days in a row now – “officially” the longest stretch in the current solar minimum. This doesn’t exactly instill confidence that solar minimum is behind us.
J. Wilson (08:24:20) :
This doesn’t exactly instill confidence that solar minimum is behind us.
What is ‘solar minimum’?
Here are the monthly sunspot numbers ~108 years ago
190006 12.1
190007 8.3
190008 4.3
190009 8.3
190010 12.9
190011 4.5
190012 0.3
190101 0.2
190102 2.4
190103 4.5
190104 0.0
190105 10.2
190106 5.8
190107 0.7
190108 1.0
190109 0.6
190110 3.7
190111 3.8
190112 0.0
190201 5.5
190202 0.0
190203 12.4
190204 0.0
190205 2.8
190206 1.4
190207 0.9
190208 2.3
190209 7.6
190210 16.3
190211 10.3
190212 1.1
when was minimum?
I see what you mean.
Dec. 1901-April 1902 had three out of five spotless months, but a 12.4 count in March and an average count of 3.0 over those five months.
On the other hand, the lowest 5-month average was April-Aug. 1902, with an average count of 1.5.
So I guess in hindsight the *sunspot* minimum was somewhere in early-to-mid 1902, but that wasn’t obvious until the end of 1902.
J. Wilson (12:20:07) :
I see what you mean.
So I guess in hindsight the *sunspot* minimum was somewhere in early-to-mid 1902, but that wasn’t obvious until the end of 1902.
There are other indicators of solar activity, such as the radio flux or magnetic polarities. They didn’t have those in 1902, so couldn’t tell, but we have, so are in a better position to gauge when ‘minimum’ was.
It seems like we can safly say that your posting on lack of sun spots don’t consistently generate sun spots but, to be sure, I’d like to see the raw data compared to the manipulated version. 😉
I decided to check the “3-monthly running mean” (a smoothing technique – no ‘magic’ to it) of sunspot numbers for the past year to see how things were going. The running mean is a way of showing trends in variable data.
The “gold standard” for sunspot number data is the Solar Influences Data Analysis Center (SIDC) in Belgium (http://www.sidc.be). SIDC issues a series of “relative sunspot numbers” (R), derived from data sent to them by 60-or-so observatories across the world. The numbers given by Tad Cook K7RA in his week ARRL Propagation Bulletin are generally from the US’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) – one of the contributors to the SIDC data set. Our own IPS Radio and Space Services also issues monthly sunspot numbers, which closely track those issued by SIDC.
So I graphed the 3-monthly running means for the period June 2008 through June 2009, for these three sources of sunspot numbers – and the results are intriguing, indeed. It appears we have two successive minima, six or seven months apart – one in August last year, the second either in February (SIDC and IPS figures) or March (SWPC figures)