While sunspots are often the proxy of choice for solar activity reports, the 10.7 cm radio band is also an excellent indicator of solar activity. As you can see in this NOAA graph below, it is slowly coming up, but there’s still a fair gap to the red line, which represents the predicted level.
Dr. Leif Svalgaard maintains a number of automated plots on solar data, one of which compares the current solar minimum to 1954, which is also considered to be a significant solar minimum. The flatness is instructive:
In other news, the Ap magnetic index still needs a jump start:
h/t to David Archibald in Tips and Notes
Stephen Wilde says:
November 23, 2010 at 1:24 pm
as that warms that in fact is interlinked with a phenomenon called global cooling up in the mesosphere above 50 kilometers
Again, increasing CO2 will cool the mesosphere.
What state does the sun need to be in to maximise that downward NOx flux ?
It is a fallacy to believe that a single ‘state’ must be responsible. The NOx flux is due to [rare] solar proton events [down below 80 km], and [rare] energetic relativistic electron precipitation [at 60-80 km] and also 1-10 keV electron precipitation [aurorae at 120 km]. The relative importance of the rare events and the low-energy auroral contribution is unknown, but the low-energy stuff doesn’t penetrate deep. The polar vortex that forms in winter isolates the polar air in the upper stratosphere and mesosphere allowing the NOx to be transported downwards with the descending vortex air and it is the polar vortex that ultimately controls the downward transport [rather than the other way around, BTW]. This happens during the polar winter and there is really not much ozone up there to be destroyed [no sunlight to produce the ozone], so any effect will have to be down in the stratosphere, so enhanced NOx down flux leads to ozone loss in the stratosphere. There is no simple easy answer to any of this. There is good info here: http://www.atmos-chem-phys.org/8/5279/2008/acp-8-5279-2008.pdf
Helpful information, thank you.
If the Haigh data is confirmed then I see little in the way of alternative explanations but we shall see.
Who said:
“Once one has eliminated the impossible then whatever remains, however implausible, must be the truth”. ?
I’d put the required top down effect from solar variability in the category of implausible rather than impossible.
Rather a lot of implausible propositions have turned out to be true in the past.
One single spike in Nov could have you back on track.
A spike is typically self-correcting and represents a transient assignable cause. If you look at the successive differences in the series, there are only two spike-like events: in mid-late 2001 and a smaller one in late 2004. In either case, the series returned to the trendline.
I would have investigated the peculiar pattern from about Sept. 01 to the end of 02. If this block is discounted, the remaining data exhibits an even cleaner curve. Some factor may have entered the system in Sept. 01, boosting the radio flux, then fading away so that the system returned to its ground state. A plot of standardized residuals might be interesting, as well as a plot of moving ranges. Remember, anything greater than three standard deviations is a reliable marker of an assignable cause; while deviations less than that could be due to chance combinations of common causes.
“Remember, anything greater than three standard deviations is a reliable marker of an assignable cause; while deviations less than that could be due to chance combinations of common causes.”
Thanks, we always can use help from people who actually know Statistics.