National power grids could overheat and air travel severely disrupted while electronic items, navigation devices and major satellites could stop working after the Sun reaches its maximum power in a few years.
Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes “from a deep slumber” sometime around 2013, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
In a new warning, Nasa said the super storm would hit like “a bolt of lightning” and could cause catastrophic consequences for the world’s health, emergency services and national security unless precautions are taken.
Scientists believe it could damage everything from emergency services’ systems, hospital equipment, banking systems and air traffic control devices, through to “everyday” items such as home computers, iPods and Sat Navs.
Due to humans’ heavy reliance on electronic devices, which are sensitive to magnetic energy, the storm could leave a multi-billion pound damage bill and “potentially devastating” problems for governments.
“We know it is coming but we don’t know how bad it is going to be,” Dr Richard Fisher, the director of Nasa’s Heliophysics division, said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.
“It will disrupt communication devices such as satellites and car navigations, air travel, the banking system, our computers, everything that is electronic. It will cause major problems for the world.
“Large areas will be without electricity power and to repair that damage will be hard as that takes time.”
vukcevic says:
June 20, 2010 at 11:40 pm
You fail to understand basic fact that polarity change is an electro-magnetic property, while formula features drive to the oscillating system based on the planetary orbital properties. Orbits do not have polarity assignation or meaning !
You used to claim that the solar cycle was due to the magnetic effect of Jupiter-shine, so perhaps it is progress that you no longer entertain any electro-magnetic causes.
It is all here:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CycleAnomalies.gif
but since you are looking at it with your eyes shut, I’ll write it again:
Maunder minimum (Long minimum)
1752 Low cycle
Dalton minimum (Long minimum)
1850 Low cycle
1913 Long minimum
1970 Low cycle
2020 Long minimum
Sequence of anomalies is: Long minimum, Low cycle, Long minimum, Low cycle etc….
Got it ?
Polarity:
You fail to understand basic fact that polarity change is an electro-magnetic property, while formula features drive to the oscillating system based on the planetary orbital properties of the planets’ magnetospheres. Orbits do not have polarity assignation or meaning !
Note the ‘abs’ attribute:
Y = A abs [Cos 2pi(t-T0)/P1 + Cos (2pi/3 + 2pi(t-T0)/P2] …….SC
Y = abs [Cos 2pi(t-T0)/P1 + Cos 2pi( t-T0)/P2 ]…………………Anomaly
As published
http://xxx.lanl.gov/ftp/astro-ph/papers/0401/0401107.pdf
You can distort facts and fiddle with minutiae as long as you whish, the formula stands.
AND WHAT IS PHYSICS BEHIND YOUR Rmax = 0.6 DM ?
I tell you what it is: nothing!
Or to be more precise one in thousand (1/1000) drift, NEGLIGIBLE !
And further more: it fails on the strongest cycle ever SC19!
Could that be reason you are unsuccessfully trying to demolish more superior solution?
Of course it is.
‘Jupiter shine’ ? that’s another rubbish you invented! Sign of desperation?
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 20, 2010 at 11:59 pm
vukcevic says:
June 20, 2010 at 11:40 pm
Orbits do not have polarity assignation or meaning !
But polar fields and solar cycles do. So, we can agree that orbits are irrelevant for this…
You used to claim that the solar cycle was due to the magnetic effect of Jupiter-shine, so perhaps it is progress that you no longer entertain any electro-magnetic causes.
I’m going to disagree with both of you here. Quite a lot of other solar research concludes that the two solar hemispheres are electro-magnetically distinct to a great extent, and that one tends to dominate the other electro-magnetically over quasi cyclic periods of time. In my studies on hemisperic sunspot asymmetry and my studies of the motion of the planets in the axis perpendicular to the orbital plane, I am getting interesting glimmerings of relationships between the times when one solar hemisphere is more active than the other, and the disposition of the planets above and below the solar equator, and their relative inclinations to the plane of invariance and each other at various points in their orbits.
It’s complex, and I haven’t got as far with it as I’d like, because unlike some here I don’t get any paid time to work on solar physics (or waste it here blitzkreiging the ideas of others), so I won’t invite the usual condemnation by offering half baked graphs now. I only mention it because in studying solar system phenomena and orbits people tend to forget that we live in a 3-d solar system in a wider galactic setting which is pervaded by an electo-magnetic soup influenced not only by the emissions of the sun.
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 20, 2010 at 10:14 pm
This is not an argument. Your page says “During the last Grand Minimum Rudolf Wolf devised a counting method…”
This is factually incorrect, as he was hardly born then.
I see your point now after explaining it more clearly, I will amend.
I do not share your views on the L&P theory and have shown how the Wolf and Wolfer method vary in times of grand minima. The majority of people would agree the current counting method is yielding a different result compared to how Wolf constructed his count. This is the reason for the Layman’s Count, which also takes out the majority of human bias, a threshold has been established.
Leif Svalgaard says:
(re: nonsense about polarity)
Perhaps your climatic and environmental (or whatever it was?) studies do not let you grasp some properties of electromagnetic events.
Let me help you with elementary basics, it is here all you need to know:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SEMc.gif
Vuk, Leif, et al
I don’t know much about the subject matter of this back-and-forth among you, but it’s an open blog, so I’ll add my 2¢ worth. Some of the terminology is unfamiliar to me. I don’t, for example, know what SBC or L&P mean, but I have spent a lifetime looking at graphs, so I will give you an external observer’s take on what may be grasped from the graph named Vuk-Failing-2.png.
(1) I’m not sure if the blue curve is intended to have a connection with anything else that is portrayed on the graph. In my eyes, it doesn’t have any at all, so I will confine my attention to the pink and green traces.
(2) The pink curve is a well-recognized linear combination of two sinusoidal functions that have different frequencies and equal amplitudes. If the amplitudes were different, the ‘envelope’ would split into upper and lower traces with a ‘gap’ between them. In the extreme case, such as in AM radio encoding, the ‘gap’ constitutes most of what is detected, and the ‘information’ is the small variation of the amplitude that sits on top of it. In such cases, the carrier frequency and amplitude are markedly different than those of the information content.
(3) The pattern of the pink trace in Vuk-Failing-2.png shows up in many situations where two influences of equal strength and similar but unequal frequencies are ‘competing’ to control some outcome. What is shown is exactly the kind of thing your eardrum would perceive when trying to listen to two audio signals with equal magnitudes but slightly different frequencies, such as a pair of out-of-tune tuning forks.
(4) I assume that there is supposed to be an obvious ‘message’ in the relationship between the pink and green curves. It is clear that in the region immediately to the left and right of the letter A, these two curves are in phase with each other, and of comparable heights in their vertical variations.
(5) In the region between the letters B and C, the two curves are more or less in opposite phase, and don’t match very well in amplitude.
(6) In the rest of the graph, the pink and green curves look pretty much like a random jumble with no apparent relationship to each other, and there is a considerable amount of phase-drift along the entire sequence.
All that being said, I may be ‘missing the message’, but if that is the case, I would submit that most people, including those with lots of technical and scientific training, would likewise miss it. If there is actually something of substance that this graph purports to demonstrate, it isn’t doing a very good job of doing so.
If there is indeed something real behind the wiggles of this graph, one would, at the very least, need to do two things: (a) find the two “almost equal, but of slightly different frequency competitors” that would of necessity have to be involved, and (b) find out why they drift out of phase with each other. In the absence of those, this is just ‘math-play’, and in its present state, not very good ‘math-play’.
/dr.bill
tallbloke says:
..the two solar hemispheres are electro-magnetically distinct to a great extent, and that one tends to dominate the other electro-magnetically over quasi cyclic periods of time.
The North /South asymmetry (as far as records go) responds to the same drive as in the anomaly formula for the Low cycle – Long minimum sequence .
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/MaunderN-S-excess.gif
the above is section of
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CycleAnomalies.gif
dr.bill says:
June 21, 2010 at 3:26 am
Vuk, Leif, et al
Dr. Bill you are spot on for blue and pink lines, they are my formulas. The green line is an ‘artificial’ sunspot sequence and normally looks like as a bridge ‘ rectified’ green signal (he may have changed the chart)
Dr. Svalgaard is trying to convey point, but failed to understand the substance of the equations, which I have explained in my latter post:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/17/nasa-warns-solar-flares-from-huge-space-storm-will-cause-devastation/#comment-413881
He regularly forgets about 1800 phase change (extra ½ cycle) re: Lost cycle 4a Usoskin et al. It is a pain going over same ground again and again.
Thanks Vuk. I think we can usefully resolve down to finer detail to get a better idea of which planetary magnetospheres might be involved and so get better clues as to mechanism. My insight earlier that the power doesn’t need to be primarily going from the planets to the sun for them to potentially (pun intended) have an effect on solar activity may help. Think Van der Graf generator for an (imperfect) analogy.
We know from the work of Jean-Pierre Desmoulins and Ching Cheh Hung that Alignments of Venus Earth and Jupiter form a beat which matches the sunspot cycle. We know this beat gets out of sync with the sunspot cycle around the time of deep minima. We know that when the beat is well in synch the amplitude of the solar cycles rises. We also know Venus doesn’t have much in the way of a magnetosphere of it’s own but is has one induced for it by the Sun.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/venus-earth-jupiter-alignment-and-the-solar-cycle/
@vukcevic says:
June 21, 2010 at 3:44 am
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CycleAnomalies.gif
That is the phase relation ship between the sunspot cycle and the coronal hole cycle.
Ulric Lyons says:
June 21, 2010 at 4:45 am
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CycleAnomalies.gif
That is the phase relation ship between the sunspot cycle and the coronal hole cycle.
Please could you tell us more about the coronal hole cycle Ulric. What is it’s periodicity? Is it stable? The page you pointed us to only goes back to 2002. Is there more publicly accessible data anywhere?
@tallbloke says:
June 21, 2010 at 5:18 am
“Please could you tell us more about the coronal hole cycle Ulric. What is it’s periodicity? Is it stable?”
17 year monthly anomaly strings in CET are the strongest and longest strings observable, with that, and the fact the Cicada has relied on a 17yr return of similar temperature/rainfall patterns for 12 out of 17 yrs for a very long time, I would say it is very stable, unlike the solar cycle which wanders so. Its length I currently estimate to be 953/56 yrs (6216d), with 953/86 yrs for the average sunspot cycle length.
On the short term, the 17yr cycle will be most out of phase with the SS cycle, at 51yrs, hence my suggestion that this is the cause of Vuk`s asymmetry observations.
And unfortunately, I do not know of any such coronal hole records previous to 2002, though using daily geomag records as a proxy would help.
vukcevic says:
June 21, 2010 at 1:33 am
It is all here:
Well, it isn’t. I raised specific concerns and you could be so good as to provide specific answers:
http://www.leif.org/research/Vuk-Failing-3.png
Here are your polar fields [pink, scaled to match sunspot number in recent cycles – the 0.63], the sunspot number [green, shifted 4 years], and your anomaly formula [blue, with anomalies marked with a red circle]. So let’s examine your claim:
You say that at A the red circle explain the mismatch. This will not do at B, so in this case your claim [‘every single’] is already false. For case C the cycle is very small, yet nowhere near any red circle, so again your claim is false. At D we had one of the largest cycles ever, yet you predict a teeny, tiny cycle and that as far way from a red circle as one can get. For several cycles around E, your are half a cycle off in phase. So, it is not true that the anomaly formula “is correct on every single occasion“, rather it fails more often than it is right. Perhaps you need another anomaly formula to take care of the anomalies not covered by the first, and perhaps another one after that, etc. Worth investigating, don’t you think?
Geoff Sharp says:
June 21, 2010 at 2:07 am
I [..] have shown how the Wolf and Wolfer method vary in times of grand minima. The majority of people would agree the current counting method is yielding a different result compared to how Wolf constructed his count. This is the reason for the Layman’s Count, which also takes out the majority of human bias, a threshold has been established.
Regardless of this, Wolfer’s method is what should be used. One could say that Wolfer’s method is under threat from people trying to re-introduce Wolf’s.
vukcevic says:
June 21, 2010 at 1:33 am
AND WHAT IS PHYSICS BEHIND YOUR Rmax = 0.6 DM ?
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0701527
And further more: it fails on the strongest cycle ever SC19!
I don’t think so. The polar fields in 1954 were the strongest ever observed, so naturally SC19 would be strong as observed.
Geoff Sharp says:
June 21, 2010 at 2:07 am
You might find this note of interest: http://www.leif.org/EOS/WolfWolferJRSSA.pdf
Geoff Sharp says:
June 21, 2010 at 2:07 am
I [..] have shown how the Wolf and Wolfer method vary in times of grand minima.
Nobody would disagree with this. As I pointed out even Wolf and Wolfer knew this. Since Wolfer’s method is to be preferred [every observer today agrees] the implication is that Wolf”s method greatly underestimates solar activity during Grand Minima, making them much less grand as also shown by the cosmic ray modulation during such minima.
Leif Svalgaard says: June 21, 2010 at 7:42 am
Worth investigating, don’t you think?
Well you have not stop investigating relentlesly for nearly 3 years now.
I say: Worth taking a stock, don’t you think?
Here are two competing hypothesis giving currently the same result:
1. Dr. Svalgaard, the world famous solar scientist
Based on 3 cycle observations using an INVENTED non-physical constant of 0.6444 (Rmax=0.6444DM). No tangible proof of mechanism recognised by classical physics laws but based on some kind of random and NEGLIGIBLE, one in thousand (1/1000) drift which
fails (1/1000 drift) on the strongest cycle ever SC19!, when it had the greatest chance of success.
There is a strong possibility of failing on the SC24 with the SSN which is daily unjustifiably overstated.
To prepare for the likely possibility of failure, another spurious ‘justification’ theory known as L&P is strongly promoted daily, but for 5 months now no results there. Smell of a rotten egg.
2. Vukcevic –unrecognised entity in solar circles and regularly insulted by the above.
Based on a simple mathematical equation, which can be used in 3 forms to track the solar sunspot record from 1810 (200 years against the above 50 years), the sunspot anomalies from 1600 (400 years) and polar fields as in the above for 50 years, all with only minor exceptions (despite of up to date not fully understood process of sunspot generation and the periodicity). In contrast to the non-physical constant, here 3 precise ASTRONOMIC CONSTANTS are used. As in the above case, no tangible proof of mechanism recognised by classical physics laws.
Of course the ‘world renowned solar scientist’ should be vastly preferable choice and read, but then it is a mystery why so much time and effort is spent to discredit the’ unrecognised entity’.
Perhaps point of contention is:
the uncertainty of an INVENTED CONSTANT vs. the certainty of the ASTRONOMIC CONSTANTS.
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 21, 2010 at 8:33 am
Wolf”s method greatly underestimates solar activity during Grand Minima, making them much less grand as also shown by the cosmic ray modulation during such minima.
Could be misconstrued. The meaning is that Wolf’s method makes the Grand Minima deeper than they really are, i.e. that they are not as Grand as minima that they would have been with Wolfer’s [and the modern] method. So, if SC24 counted the modern way turns out to be 72, then Wolf would have reported a lower number, e.g. 55 or 35 [hence your preference for Wolf, I suppose].
Now, on a more important issue. What we try to express with the various solar indices is ‘solar activity’, i.e. the import of magnetic fields. People that worry about decaying satellite orbits need a ‘correct’ or meaningful measure. There is a simple test whether a measure is good: does the observed orbital decay match that modeled from the solar indices.
Several scientists [myself included] have shown that lately, the official sunspot number is seriously too low. Excluding specks and pores [Wolf’s method] would make the sunspot number even lower and thus make the calculated orbital decays deviate even more from the observed ones. This is independent of any L&P considerations.
Re L&P: up to now, L&P is not a ‘theory’ but a set of high-quality measurements by the best solar observer using one of the best solar telescopes. The ‘theory’ part is whether the trend will continue. But, the observed fact is that there are more specks relative to ‘spots’ than in the past and that the lower end of the ‘speck count’ is missing because as soon as the magnetic field falls below 1500 G the speck is very hard to see [effectively invisible].
So, the observed L&P [up to now] means that the sunspot number is even lower than without L&P. This is consistent with the discrepancy with the F10.7 flux. It also means that the SSN is no longer a valid measure of solar activity and that may have happened before, e.g. during the Maunder Minimum].
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 20, 2010 at 6:02 pm
Ulric Lyons says:
June 20, 2010 at 4:46 pm
Anyone else notice that people get aggitated when the Earth does a SBC on the HCS ?
I was in the USSR in the 1970s and the director of an insane asylum told me that his inmates went berserk at such SBCs. In fact, he was trying to push the idea that he could predict solar conditions by watching his inmates. I don’t think he had much luck with that idea, but it certainly alternative ‘science’…
_________________________________________
I was thinking in terms of folk on this thread a couple of days ago!
Leif Svalgaard says:
I don’t think so. The polar fields in 1954 were the strongest ever observed, so naturally SC19 would be strong as observed.
Diversion detected!
The random and NEGLIGIBLE, one in thousand (1/1000) drift, on which you base your theory, has failed during the strongest cycle ever SC19 (to create weak SC20), when it had the greatest chance of success.
Ulric Lyons says:
Anyone else notice that people get aggitated when the Earth does a SBC on the HCS ?
I was in the USSR in the 1970s and the director of an insane asylum told me that his inmates went berserk at such SBCs. …
And also that drifting north magnetic pole, dividing itself in two, perhaps provoking all those cases of bi-polarity and personality changes, a la “jekyll and mr.hyde”. Really something to worry about.☺
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 21, 2010 at 9:37 am
Several scientists [myself included] have shown that lately, the official sunspot number is seriously too low. Excluding specks and pores [Wolf’s method] would make the sunspot number even lower and thus make the calculated orbital decays deviate even more from the observed ones. This is independent of any L&P considerations.
It’s not independent of considerations of the comparability of the current method with the historical record though. Do sunspots make satellite orbits change Leif? No. So maybe magnetic indices just don’t match perfectly with sunspot numbers. Live with it.
vukcevic says:
June 21, 2010 at 10:40 am
The random and NEGLIGIBLE, one in thousand (1/1000) drift, on which you base your theory, has failed during the strongest cycle ever SC19 (to create weak SC20), when it had the greatest chance of success.
Now it is SC20 and not SC19, but OK, perhaps you meant SC20. The reason SC20 is weak is rooted in what Bob Howard observed:
“Observations of the magnetic fields in the polar regions of the Sun are presented for the period 1960–1971. At the start of this interval the fields at the two poles were consistently of opposite sign and averaged around 1 G. Early in 1961 the field in the south decreased suddenly [compare with http://www.leif.org/research/MWO-1961-21-July-Magnetogram.png ] and the field in the north decreased in strength slowly over the next few years. By the mid-1960′s the fields at both poles were quite weak and irregular.”
During the decline of a solar cycle, flux from decaying active regions are carried towards the poles. If equal amount of flux was transported, there would be no change of the polar fields. The build-up of polar flux [seed for next cycle] is controlled by the tilt angle between line joining the two bipoles and the equator [Joy’s Law], in turn determining the probability that an imbalance of polarity reaching the poles by the random walk across the surface [remember that this value is very small, only 1/1000 of the total flux in the active regions]. During cycle 19 that tilt angle was observed to be smaller than usual [see Figure 3 of http://www.leif.org/EOS/1006-2061v1.pdf ], hence the weaker polar fields going into cycle 20, hence the weak SC20.
You can learn more about these processes [and about what controls the tilt] here: http://www.leif.org/EOS/arnabresearch.pdf
tallbloke says:
June 21, 2010 at 11:14 am
It’s not independent of considerations of the comparability of the current method with the historical record though.
The current method has been used since 1882, so to a large extent ‘is’ the historical record.
Do sunspots make satellite orbits change Leif? No. So maybe magnetic indices just don’t match perfectly with sunspot numbers. Live with it.
Nobody cares about sunspot numbers per se. Only to the extent that they are a proxy for the magnetic flux. And, indeed, the match is no longer good. So why do we care? Because the match may also have been broken in the past [e.g. the Maunder Minimum] meaning that most correlations based on the ‘sunspot number’ become invalid as ‘sunspots make satellite orbits change Leif? No’. So neither do sunspots make climate change or anything else. The people that claim so must ‘live with that’. If they accept this and do, then all is fine.
vukcevic says:
June 21, 2010 at 9:00 am
it is a mystery why so much time and effort is spent to discredit the’ unrecognised entity’.
One must spend time to combat pseudo-science whenever it rears its head. It is perhaps a mystery why you keep pushing this [and other nonsense as well] after having been taught otherwise. Perhaps the learning-disability or learning-resistance I have commented on previously.
Now, you can try to regain some credibility by addressing
http://www.leif.org/research/Vuk-Failing-3.png
Here are your polar fields [pink, scaled to match sunspot number in
recent cycles – the 0.63], the sunspot number [green, shifted 4
years], and your anomaly formula [blue, with anomalies marked with a
red circle]. So let’s examine your claim:
You say that at A the red circle explain the mismatch. This will not
do at B, so in this case your claim [‘every single’] is already false.
For case C the cycle is very small, yet nowhere near any red circle,
so again your claim is false. At D we had one of the largest cycles
ever, yet you predict a teeny, tiny cycle and that as far way from a
red circle as one can get. For several cycles around E, your are half
a cycle off in phase. So, it is not true that the anomaly formula “is
correct on every single occasion“, rather it fails more often than it
is right. Perhaps you need another anomaly formula to take care of the
anomalies not covered by the first, and perhaps another one after
that, etc.
Leif Svalgaard says:
Now, you can try to regain some credibility…
Diversion detected again !
Tilt angle was introduced to explain defunct theory of no tangible proof of mechanism recognised by classical physics laws but based on some kind of random and NEGLIGIBLE, one in thousand (1/1000) drift which failed when it had the greatest chance of success (SC19-SC20).
Without the cycle-dependent variations of the tilt angle the weak cycle 20 would have been unable to offset the polar field after cycle 19.
http://www.leif.org/EOS/1006-3061v1.pdf page 9 :
Undoubtedly a fiddle introduced to get wanted result.
What about L&P effect being relentlessly promoted (no known physics mechanism) as a cover up if Rmax=0.6444DM fails ?
No Sir,
you are the world famous solar scientist, you explain how does your INVENTED non-physical constant of 0.6444 works, and according to whose private ‘solar dynamo’ Hathaway’s, Dicpati’s, Svalgaard et al (all different and mostly defunct), or maybe somebody else’s after SC24 is done.
You have some explaining to do, I am inconsequential minnow, my ranting is irrelevant.