From NASA News: Solar ‘Current of Fire’ Speeds Up
What in the world is the sun up to now?
In today’s issue of Science, NASA solar physicist David Hathaway reports that the top of the sun’s Great Conveyor Belt has been running at record-high speeds for the past five years.
“I believe this could explain the unusually deep solar minimum we’ve been experiencing,” says Hathaway. “The high speed of the conveyor belt challenges existing models of the solar cycle and it has forced us back to the drawing board for new ideas.”
The Great Conveyor Belt is a massive circulating current of fire (hot plasma) within the sun. It has two branches, north and south, each taking about 40 years to complete one circuit. Researchers believe the turning of the belt controls the sunspot cycle.
Above: An artist’s concept of the sun’s Great Conveyor Belt. [larger image]
Hathaway has been monitoring the conveyor belt using data from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). The top of the belt skims the surface of the sun, sweeping up knots of solar magnetism and carrying them toward the poles. SOHO is able to track those knots—Hathaway calls them “magnetic elements”–and thus reveal the speed of the underlying flow.
“It’s a little like measuring the speed of a river on Earth by clocking the leaves and twigs floating downstream,” Hathaway explains.SOHO’s dataset extends all the way back to 1996 and spans a complete solar cycle. Last year, Lisa Rightmire, a student of Hathaway from the University of Memphis, spent the entire summer measuring magnetic elements. When she plotted their speeds vs. time, she noticed how fast the conveyor belt has been going.
A note about “fast”: The Great Conveyor Belt is one of the biggest things in the whole solar system and by human standards it moves with massive slowness. “Fast” in this context means 10 to 15 meters per second (20 to 30 miles per hour). A good bicyclist could easily keep up.
Below: The velocity of the Great Conveyor Belt (a.k.a. “meridianal flow”) since 1996. Note the higher speeds after ~2004. credit: Hathaway and Rightmire, 2010. [larger image]
The speed-up was surprising on two levels.
First, it coincided with the deepest solar minimum in nearly 100 years, contradicting models that say a fast-moving belt should boost sunspot production. The basic idea is that the belt sweeps up magnetic fields from the sun’s surface and drags them down to the sun’s inner dynamo. There the fields are amplified to form the underpinnings of new sunspots. A fast-moving belt should accelerate this process.
So where have all the sunspots been? The solar minimum of 2008-2009 was unusually deep and now the sun appears to be on the verge of a weak solar cycle.
Instead of boosting sunspots, Hathaway believes that a fast-moving Conveyor Belt can instead suppress them “by counteracting magnetic diffusion at the sun’s equator.” He describes the process in detail in Science (“Variations in the Sun’s Meridional Flow over a Solar Cycle,” 12 March 2010, v327, 1350-1352).
The second surprise has to do with the bottom of the Conveyor Belt.
SOHO can only clock the motions of the visible top layer. The bottom is hidden by ~200,000 kilometers of overlying plasma. Nevertheless, an estimate of its speed can be made by tracking sunspots.
“Sunspots are supposedly rooted to the bottom of the belt,” says Hathaway. “So the motion of sunspots tells us how fast the belt is moving down there.”
He’s done that—plotted sunspot speeds vs. time since 1996—and the results don’t make sense. “While the top of the conveyor belt has been moving at record-high speed, the bottom seems to be moving at record-low speed. Another contradiction.”
Above: An artist’s concept of the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Launched in Feb. 2010, SDO will be able to look inside the sun to study the conveyor belt in greater detail, perhaps solving the mysteries Hathaway and Rightmire have uncovered. [larger image]
Could it be that sunspots are not rooted to the bottom of the Conveyor Belt, after all? “That’s one possibility” he notes. “Sunspots could be moving because of dynamo waves or some other phenomenon not directly linked to the belt.”
What researchers really need is a good look deep inside the sun. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, launched in February 2010, will provide that when its instruments come online later this year. SDO is able to map the sun’s interior using a technique called helioseismology. SOHO can do the same thing, but not well enough to trace the Great Conveyor Belt all the way around. SDO’s advanced sensors might reveal the complete circuit.
And then…? “It could be the missing piece we need to forecast the whole solar cycle,” says Hathaway.
Stay tuned for that.
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He said the exact opposite less than four years ago.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/10may_longrange.htm
More from Hathaway’s 2006 article. His numbers are off by more than order of magnitude from what he is saying now.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/10may_longrange.htm
I’ll take whatever Hathaway says with a grain of salt. This guy has been pretty much wrong about everything for the past decade if not longer. I still remember his prediction about how this was going to be a huge cycle peaking at over 150 in less then two years.
Well, another thing we thought we understood that isn’t quite what we expected… At least the Solar guys are willing to admit they only have a tiny clue and really need to work on it more (and learn some really fun stuff in the process…). Wonder when the Climate “scientists” will figure out that doing Real Science ™ is a whole lot more fun than being a political hack…
Sounds like he’s making it up as he goes along. Sort of like climate science.
I love our solar minimum. Thank You God.
They’re modest and not making predictions hundreds of years into the future about how the solar cycle will roast/freeze us. Too bad. They’ll probably be boxing groceries in a few years when all science funding is vacuumed up by the warmistas. Why should we bother with understanding the Sun when the Oil companies are bake us in a CO2 greenhouse?
ahhh when Scientists fail to make good use of their current grants and go off on wild goose chases and then discover that they really didn’t know anything at all…. we’re suppose to give them more money and funding to waste on their curiousity!?
What arrogance.
That’s a pretty egregious contradiction Steve Goddard has highlighted. Help, Leif.
==========
Yawn….
Just a few years ago it was settled science.
NOAA said with great fanfare that they had a model that was 99% accurate. In December 2006, Hathaway said this, ” Solar cycle 24, due to peak in 2010 or 2011 looks like its going to be one of the most intense cycles since record-keeping began almost 400 years ago.”
Based on the above comments – and recent climategate revelations, of course – I’m really getting nervous about the real state of science as a whole. As a retired engineer who relied upon solid physics and math my whole career, I have to say this is getting disconcerting, to say the least!
Chris (20:43:05) : “Sounds like he’s making it up as he goes along. Sort of like climate science.”
No, not at all like climate science. AFAIK, (1) He hasn’t said “the science is settled.” (2) He isn’t up to his elbows in conflicting interest investments. (3) He hasn’t perverted the peer review process. (4) He hasn’t called conflicting opinions “voodoo” or “flat earth” science. (5) He hasn’t conspired to prevent publication of alternate views. (6) Hasn’t hidden any declines. (7) He hasn’t destroyed, hidden, or fudged any data. (8) He hasn’t refused to comply with any FOI requests. And so on.
Science is sort of an “as you go along” activity, largely trial-and-error. Remember, as observational astronomers say, “Astrophysical accuracy means you got the decimal point in the right place.” Hathaway is a genuine scientist. He’s just a little back-ordered on success lately. It’s part of the process.
I asked my UI astronomy professor, Dr. Jim Kaler (emeritus) about this and he emailed this reply:
“To the question — I have NO idea, and neither does anybody else at this
point. the sun has been extremely quiet since the end of the last cycle,
unusually so, so one cannot rul eout a new extended minimum, yet the
cycle could just be delayed — it’s too early to tell. The people who
thought they could predict this one seem to have failed, but all we can do
for now is to wait it out. I do not think climate models know quite what
to do with solar activity, but that’s just an opinion. One problem is how
this all factors into the politics of global warming.”
Wise words from a fantastic instructor! I am still expecting the sun to slip back, but every time I say that, more pesky spots show up! Grrrr!!
Having read both articles I don’t see any contradiction. The original article was only discussing the speed of sun spots thought to be attached to the lower part of the conveyor belt.
This new article is now adding a new dimension the speed of the upper part of the conveyor belt which is surprisingly much faster than the lower part. This makes the assumption that sun spots are attached to the lower part of the belt questionable. That’s why they hope the new satellite will allow them to see and measure the speed of the lower part more directly to see it is really as slow as was thought.
The better questions you ask the better answers you get, when you frame the question too tightly, your answers don’t fit the ideas you had. Real science will show you how much you didn’t even have a clue about when you started.
I prefer to let the data speak for itself. It never lies, even if you don’t understand what it is saying.
It is refreshing to hear of honest science at NASA afer all “climatologist” propaganda. Hathaway et al. construct theories, expose them to critics, test and if proven wrong replace them.
“He said the exact opposite less than four years ago.”
But for a scientist that’s exactly the right thing to do if he has been proven wrong, isn’t it?
“Conjectures and refutations”
I can only guess as yo whats up with Hathaway’s flip flopping on the velocity. It does seem a bit odd that he doesn’t mention it. Perhaps its in the Science article.
kim (20:59:57) :
That’s a pretty egregious contradiction Steve Goddard has highlighted. Help, Leif.
It is honorable to learn and to change your mind when evidence does not support your ideas. David Hathaway is doing this right [there is no better believer than a reformed sinner 🙂 ].
Last autumn I gave a talk on Solar Cycle Prediction at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ., that touched on several of the points David brings up: http://www.leif.org/research/Predicting%20the%20Solar%20Cycle.pdf
Might be helpful if these guys would stop acting like fortune tellers reading chicken entrails, and just stick to the basic reporting of observations, without elaboration. The perception is rapidly becoming such that whenever anyone with a title including the terms “climate” and “scientist” uses a phrase similar to “what this might mean”, it’s a red flag they’re about to pull something out of their arses, no matter how elementary the supposition may seem to be.
Grabbing headlines is ultimately a myopic tactic, particularly if it earns the “boy who cried wolf” label. And it shouldn’t be a race to be more wrong, more often, than Ehrlich.
The Sun is one of the most fascinating things I know of and definitely one of the most subtle things. The closer we study it with increasingly better tools the more it defies our understanding. When you compare billions of years of Solar history to SOHO’s short tenure from 1996, it seems arrogant to assume we have it all figured out. Yet we continue to stumble over the same concept of “the science is settled” with a limited data set.
“It could be the missing piece we need to forecast the whole solar cycle,” says Hathaway.
That not the proper way to end a research article if they want more money to study the problem further!!! Please repeat after me… Much research (and money) will be needed to find out exactly what the sun is up to.
If one side is slowing down and the other side accelerating… something will snap!
Maybe Leif won’t mind being linked. From his web site, here’s his “Predicting the Solar Cycle” Power Point presentations, (September, 2009, Flagstaff):
http://www.leif.org/research/Predicting%20the%20Solar%20Cycle.ppt
All this solar conveyor belt stuff is silly — silly to think any artefacts survive deep within the sun. Sunspots are obviously manifested locally. Bad science going on here.
Throwing solar scientists in the same boat as the AGW’ers is folly methinks. There’s quite a difference between being incorrect about a particular theory and being wrong and trying to fool yourself and everyone else that your theory is correct.
I don’t mind Scientists being wrong repeatedly as long as they are working in earnest and actually have the courage to make a prediction based on their theory.
AGW’ers fail to do any real science. They are truly anti-science.