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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Leaves carried on the surface of a river – is either a clumsy analogy or an unwitting insight.The greatest velocity is somewhat below the surface and the lowest layer is a fraction of the flow rate,almost stagnant in slow moving,lamellar-flowing rivers. I think one should expect considerable turbulance in a highly fluid medium like the sun’s plasma where both fluid dynamics and high thermal events are at play. The river is closer to a conveyor than anything on the sun but even it is more complex than a conveyor. Let go of the conveyor analogy and maybe the data will make sense. It’s too late to save the cash spent on the bottom-of-the-conveyor-thingy but maybe it will detect the seismics of turbulence.
The illustration shows symmetrical circulation patterns. If the pattern was rather more wedge-shaped and thicker at the base, then of course the lower stream would be slower than the upper.
Any medium that is stretched has to move faster.
.
B t w how do the present sunspots follow L£P prediction. Leif Svalgaards graph doesn’t seem to be updated for a while http://www.leif.org/research/Livingston%20and%20Penn.png
Could the sunspot fading be a result of changing conveyor belt change?
>>>Leif Svalgaard (23:11:05) :
>>>Thus the gravitational force that binds the Earth to the Sun
>>>is decreasing and the Earth recedes.
Can the Sun not impart extra angular momentum to the Earth via gravitational field effects? Thus giving a larger orbit. Just a thought.
.
Give the buck a break!
This is theory and he is close to understanding this belt.
He has not incorporated that the sun has rotated every 24 days into his theory.
Like the rest of the scientists on this planet, not a single one has incoparated the planets rotaion and just jumped on the theory end.
Until recently I myself have been adjusting theories I went along until the science and every concievable end matched that there is no mistakes left out.
I have been studying the circulation of this planet and it is quite simular due to rotation.
He has just made the same mistake as everyone else and took a slice latterally of the sun as if it did not rotate.
The question that begs asking is what drives these changes in speed of the suns conveyer belt? Is there a connection with solar motion of the large planets around the barycentre? The conveyers are not in a steady state so there must be some outside influence that is driving these changes. It is difficult to conceive how these appreciable changes could be internally driven within the sun. It appears the most logical place to look for an external driving force is the solar motion influences on the sun.
It wasn;t but just a few years ago Hathaway said the conveyor belt was moving at an all time record low, and THAT was going to lead to an eventual minimum.
Do they have any idea what they are talking about?
http://solarcycle24com.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=globalwarming&thread=1128&page=2#43477
” . . .
interaction of the Sun’s magnetosphere and the Earth’s magnetosphere.
For instance there were observations and a couple of papers pointing to observed
heating in the upper atmosphere from this interaction.
Second is the phenomena of our entire solar system as it moves through the
Milky Way as discussed in some later papers in the AGU link I posted previously.
Politically I am really focused on how Hathaway will over time acknowledge
fellow NASA scientist Hung’s work on the barycenter and the solar cycle
and then NASA itself admit the Sun might have something to do with
climate modulation … even if its just indirect like the
magnetosphere/cosmic ray/cloud formation thing.
Hathaway just started talking Solar Grand Minimum!
. . .
My climate model of stolen solar system barycentric phenomena says …
1) This Solar Grand Minima will be a Dalton Type.
2) We will get 2 more, possibly a Maunder type after that (172*2 ys)
3) The next one after will be a barycenter ‘phase change’ maximum (MWP repeat).
4) Then a Wolf … Sporer repeat leading into the end of the Holocene
interglacial and into the next glaciation of this late Pleistocene Ice Age
(< millenium to happen).
… and I couch that with the possibility some factor pushes us to the
preMilankovitch (5 100k yr cycles) period where we did 50/50 glaciation
and interglacial. I'm doubtfull however because the paleo record indicates
we are on the low side … but when you blow up the relatively stability
of the climate (as per Lindzen) with T on the 'y axis' … who knows at this point?
. . . "
Just a few thoughts on
Hathaway NASA and
also barycenter 'phase change' maximum.
“Jimmy Haigh (03:27:40) :
From the number of different predictions about the solar cycle on Leif’s presentation it looks like no one really has a clue! Maybe it’s chaotic like the climate? And they’re trying to tell us that they can model chaos”
While you can’t predict the exact state of a chaotic system for a given moment far in the future, you can nevertheless model its general behaviour if your model is good enough.
For the same reason, it’s not enough to dismiss GCMs with a casual “Oh it’s chaotic, you can’t predict anything” remark. There are other valid reasons to reject the projections of current GCMs, namely that they have insufficient, maybe even incorrect modeling of humidity, ocean currents and clouds.
The carona of the sun is quite simular to our outer atmosphere.
Gases compressed become liquid. This liquid from rotation is compressed and as the sun slows, it expands.
The has a much greater mass that pulls much of the gases back on itself.
Leif,
The silence is deafening:
2006
“The Sun’s Great Conveyor Belt has slowed to a record-low crawl…In recent years, however, the belt has decelerated to 0.75 m/s in the north and 0.35 m/s in the south. “We’ve never seen speeds so low.”
2010
“The Sun’s Great Conveyor Belt has been running at record-high speeds for the past five years…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 ”
His graph shows the peak in 2006, right when the he previously claimed the record minimum. This isn’t an issue of “theory” or “changing his mind”, rather it is an indication of a much more serious fundamental data collection problem.
In reference to the changing Earth orbit, there are other orbiting bodies that change the shape of our orbit. The Earth’s orbit is becoming more elliptical each year as influenced by the outer planets.
The next ice age is where we are heading.
roger samson (04:29:41) :
The question that begs asking is what drives these changes in speed of the suns conveyer belt? Is there a connection with solar motion of the large planets around the barycentre? The conveyers are not in a steady state so there must be some outside influence that is driving these changes. It is difficult to conceive how these appreciable changes could be internally driven within the sun. It appears the most logical place to look for an external driving force is the solar motion influences on the sun.
The suns rotation and activity is very simular to our pressure sytems that move in the hemispheres.
We have 3 circulation systems of the lower atmosphere The Northern Hemisphere, the Equatorial Region and the Southern Hemisphere.
Through rotation, the Equatorial region runs across the Equator keeping split the Hemispheres. The Hemispheres circulation runs from Poles to Equator and back again.
So the big questions remains. What influences the speed of the meridional flow?
Could it be related to rotation velocity?
My theory on sunspots?
Mass (meteors, debris or other foreign objects) hitting the sun.
Remember, our solar system is moving at an incredible speed through space and our larges target with the most mass is the sun.
STEPHEN PARKER (23:46:47) :
Thank you wayne,leif, and just the facts and all the rest of you for the most interesting subject. A drop in world temps would be catastrophic for the planet, but in a weird way im longing for it just to see all the warmists squirm, although leif often bursts my bubble with inconvenient facts and science,Grrr!
Please, more sun stuff from you educated types!
P S is there a site i can go to for this stuff?
Well, even if my crazy view were to happen there is going to be no catastrophic drop, not from my viewpoint. Just a very slow drop back to where we were 200-300 years ago. I say 200 or 300 because around 1810 it was nearly as cold as around 1700, roughly. If you can accept that we did in fact warm and if you can accept that it was primarily solar induced and accepting even the high amount stated by some AGW proponents (1ºC), it will take that same many years to bring us back to before the grand maximum, very slowly, just like it went up, very slowly. There are some assumptions there; one is co2 means very little due to h2o’s huge predominance, h2o – co2 band overlaps, h2o’s ability to change states, and clouds properties themselves.
My view was built solely upon the international SSN number series for we have no better data to look at without jumping to proxies and proxies must be taken very carefully as being real data. I’m not saying they are necessarily wrong, just usually questionable because other factors can change the same proxy leaving more questions. It’s much like temperature measurements. I have seen two foot long mercury thermometers you could read accurately to one-tenth of a degree. We usually now replace them with electronic thermometers that do good to be accurate to one degree over long periods without recalibration, sometimes two degrees. Are you going to question readings taken in 1900 by eye or readings taken in 2009 electronically as being correct?
CORRECTION to wayne (22:20:12): And while I’m here, I am going to correct another correction of my correction! “(greater 1ºC)” should have read “(less than 1ºC)”. All of that because I typed a < symbol without HTML encoding. Whew! I made a mess of my first comment.
It’s the Bernoulli effect taking place on the sun. It applies to all fluids.
KimW (03:37:25) :
(…) It seems that the more we know, it shows us how little we know.
Now there is a truly intelligent statement!
Clive E Burkland (04:58:11) :
“So the big questions remains. What influences the speed of the meridional flow? Could it be related to rotation velocity?”
I suggest take a look at the PF equation numbers (2×11.862 and 19.859) in the formula http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC17.htm
which is an excellent agreement with research done by Hulburt Center for Space Research (by Wang , Lean and Sheeley) and Max-Planck-Institut ( Solanki et al)
Two relevant papers are:
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1538-4357/577/1/L53/16614.text.html
and
http://www.aanda.org/index.php?option=article&access=standard&Itemid=129&url=/articles/aa/full/2004/42/aa1024/aa1024.right.html
Very interesting.
But a little bit risky?
We have been aware of a correlation between sunspots and climate and now we see a correlation of the sunspots with conveyor belt speeds.
If we force the climate scientists to accept solar forcing and abandon the idea of CO2 and anthropogenic forcing, they will be reluctant to give up all that money. They won’t like that.
The great advantage of AGW is that none of that grant money seems to get spent on hardware. I doubt Phil Jones has spent a penny on thermometers and he certainly seems to have spent very little on computers or computer scientists and it seems that all they do is give each other work and send each other bills.
But if they accept that the sun influences climate after all (something many of us assume intuitively to be the case based on our experience of the differences between summer and winter, night and day, cloudy or open skies, then the eco-engineers will take possession of the golden goose and cook it.
They’ll say “Ok, while it isn’t CO2 and we (humanity) didn’t cause it, climate change is still bad for us and we’ll still have to spend lots of money on it.”
The grey men will make money whatever, carbon trading or from the big engineering contracts.
A space deployed sun shade is the most obvious beginning and that will be phenomenally expensive.
The real danger is that all of this money spent might actually produce some changes in climate.
My order of preference would be:
1) spend no money on climate manipulation strategies.
2) if you have to spend the money then spend it on something that won’t actually do anything
3) never spend it on things that might do something… no good can come of it and we should remeber the law of unitneded consequences
The problem is that option 1) is unrealistic because climate change is the biggest golden goose in history.
So we are left with option (2).
AGW is a phantom and demonstrably the majority of the money is actually not spent on anything at all.
SOX emissions are good example. We in the west have spent a bundle of cash on taking sulphur out of our fuels but in the IPCC 4th report they can’t actually say what the current level of SOX emissions are. They don’t know if they’ve gone down up or stayed the same. i.e. other countries have increased their emission to fillt he void.
Chances are CO2 measures will not be effective either but it doesn’t matter if they are since CO2 doesn’t seem to have a major influence on climate.
But that’s the attraction, while they can’t actually benefit the climate, they aren’t likely to do it any real harm either.
On the other hand, eco engineering means lots of money spent on hardware and whatever they do may produce dramatic and rapid results.
The problem is that eco engineers can come up with lots of ways to insulate us from solar energy but none to replace it.
It would be a shame if they sucecceed in shutting us off from the sun just when we are in a cooling spell because taking the particles out of thee atmosphere or removing the sun shade will only restore access to whatever level of solar heating is available, it can do nothing to replace the lost income while thee barriers were up.
It doesn’t help that the AGW campaign has been about pursuading us that warm in bad and cold is good. It will be too late to complain about that when we are all blocks of ice.
It would have been far better if this global warming scam had been a global cooling scam that said that CO2 was blocking the sun and causing us to cool down and cold is bad but warm is good.
We could survive that scam.
We can’t survive “warm is bad” and any effective intervention that can only reduce temperatures but not elevate them could be the end of us all.
That means we have to support option 2 and that means we have to pretend that AGW is real and the only cause of warming and we have to pretend that carbons trading is effective and all we need to do.
To understand the attraction of AGWE when faced with a dire alternative, I am remindeed of a story.
A man takes the train to work, same compartment and same fellow passengers every day. He reads his paper, does the crossword then tears it into tiny pieces which he spreads all around him on the floor.
After some months his fellow passengeres can endure no longer.
“Excuse me,” says one, “but why do you do that?”
“To keep the elephants away.” he replies.
“But there are no elephants” objects the other.
“I know, effective, isn’t it.”
That’s the attraction of believing in AGW and Carbon trading. Even carbon sequestration, if they must. The proof of its effectiveness, is that there are no elephants even if there are no elephants in the first place.
Better that than letting lose the big game hunters… the loss of the buffalo was not a good idea for the US.
All in all, while the advance in knowledge is admirable, the problem is with its impact and it may be that anything which tends to shift us from stupid expensive but ultimately ineffectual stratagies toward stupid expensive but dangerously effective stratagies has to be avoided. Interventionist measures have a habit of suffering mission creep or a cascadee of one bad move leading to another.
If the engineers have their way and we start to freeze, having effectively plunged us into a new ice age, they then have to find a way to turn up the wick on the sun, to look for ways to interefer with the conveyor belt.
Or maybe they will see what can be done to spark up Jupiter…. it isn’t that far below the required mass for spontaneous ignition and maybe they can find a way to prime the pump as it were.
Then we are in for a long sustained spider swallowing sequence (where the man who swallowed a fly that wriggled and tickled in side him ends up swallowing ever large animals.
Leif Svalgaard (23:11:05) :
I’ve read that the sun is constantly growing until it gets red and then shrinking before dying.
How come the earth is moving away?
The Blog of Steve Schwartz
“No One Knows What the F*** They’re Doing (or “The 3 Types of Knowledge”)”
http://jangosteve.com/post/380926251/no-one-knows-what-theyre-doing
Leif, you might have some detailed information on this question, why do the two hemispheres differ at all, being a perfectly symmetrical ball of gases and core? Active regions vary so markedly from north to south, is this difference driven solely by the overall sun-size magnetic field? Seems it must, I can’t think of anything else to break the symmetry. I’ve noticed before how the southern pole usually has a coronal hole but not the north, kind of like earth’s ozone hole, at the South Pole but not the North Pole. For that questions I draw a blank.
The solar northern hemisphere has not been looking too bad so far in 2010.
South is a little bit dead. Solar flux has yet to reach 100, L&P on still on track.
This is getting pretty interesting.
John Whitman (00:19:10) :
Leif, so, are you suggesting that in 2010 after the vast increase in data since 1902 we still await a validated theory of solar dynamics that was lacking in 1902?
Basically, yes. Now, this does not mean we have not made progress. It means that we have good several ideas, but don’t know which is the right one.
What are the 2010 front runner theories?
There are theories on different levels. We have little doubt that a magnetic dynamo is operating, that is: circulation of solar plasma across existing magnetic fields left over from the previous cycle amplifies that field by winding it up. The amplified field makes it to the surface where solar activity results. The field disperses and sinks back into the Sun for another round of winding, and the cycle continues.
Within that broad framework [which was not known in 1902] we need to know more about the circulation patterns and speeds. This is where the great uncertainty is. SDO will help getting a better picture. Another problem is the location of the dynamo: shallow or deep. We don’t know that yet. Perhaps there is more than one, so both shallow and deep dynamos may be operating at the same time. And finally, the evolution of the magnetic field at the surface is not well known, because the magnetic ‘elements’ are so small that they are just below observational resolution. This will also improve in the near future with both space and ground based telescopes. So, there is hope that we can figure out what we are missing. Failed models are useful to show us avenues that were not fruitful.
vukcevic (05:39:47) :
I suggest take a look at the PF equation numbers (2×11.862 and 19.859) in the formula
Please, your peddling is not useful, nor does it represent the actual state of affairs. We have been down that road before, so no need to rehash this.
KimW (03:37:25) :
(…) It seems that the more we know, it shows us how little we know.
Not quite correct. The more we know, the more questions we can ask. Questions that could not even have been conceived without our increase in knowledge.
Steve Goddard (04:52:54) :
This isn’t an issue of “theory” or “changing his mind”, rather it is an indication of a much more serious fundamental data collection problem
First, he was referring to speeds at two different levels, lower and upper. Second, the circulation is difficult to measure [especially at depth], so it is not a data ‘collection’ problem, it is just hard to do. Motions on the Sun are in the km per second level: 2000 m/s from rotation and 500-1000 m/s from random convection, so to find a signal at the 1-10 m/s level is just hard.