From the Marshall Space Flight Center, Dr. Hathaway’s page:
Current prediction for the next sunspot cycle maximum gives a smoothed sunspot number maximum of about 58 in July of 2013. We are currently two years into Cycle 24 and the predicted size continues to fall.
Additionally, the monthly data plots are out, and there’s been little change from last month in the three major solar indexes plotted by the Space Weather Prediction Center:
h/t to WUWT reader harrywr2
Deb says:
February 10, 2011 at 8:24 pm
So, not being a scientist, I read above that UV is not diminished by lack of sunspots, but may be associated with lower flux? Is this partially right?
Sunspots, F10.7 flux and UV are related but not necessarily hard linked. Plage areas or faculae which are bright regions on the solar surface emit F10.7 flux and EUV (extreme ultra violet) while there is no sunspot occurrence. The current EUV level is at the same point of the SC22/23 min showing it can also move lower than the sunspot count.
Sam Glasser says:
February 10, 2011 at 6:32 am
Please stick to “science” and don’t get involved with “judgements” (i.e. Layman’s Count or HAO/NASA). Allow us to decide what is “junk” or whether NASA practices “good science”.
Dr. Leif Svalgaard says:
There are judgments in science related to scientific value. Does a claim meet minimum standard in justification? If not, it is ‘junk’. As a practicing scientist I am qualified to judge what is good and bad science. You are, of course, welcome to ignore my judgment; your loss.
Ninderthana says:
Dr. Leif Svalgaard deserves to be praised for his long and distinguished career, whose accomplishments speak for themselves. In addition, he should be thanked for his invaluable explanation and incites into solar/terrestrial theory, which continue to help so many on this blog understand difficult concepts and complex theories.
However, having said that I would like to make the following comments:
Dr. Leif Svalgaard is making all the mistakes of a scientist well past his prime.
He has been involved in the field so long, he actually believes that he has the right to decide what is good and what is bad science in his field.
Like most aging scientist in their field, he is so entrenched in the current mind-set, that he is essentially incapable of seeing any new paradigm shifts that may come along.
Hence, his word on what he considers to be good and bad science, can do great damage any new ideas that are put forward by any educated layman or active scientist
who are commenting on this field.
While he is clearly a very intelligent man who is complete control of his (sharp) mental faculties, he has let his ego convince himself that he is the final arbitrator on what is good and what is bad science.
Hopefully, he will get out of this childish trap very soon, otherwise he will permanently taint his solid reputation as a great scientist in his field.
Leif Svalgaard says:
February 10, 2011 at 9:48 pm
rbateman says:
February 10, 2011 at 8:02 pm
GIMP is used to block out all pixels below a threshold value. Then an SSN is assigned according to # of pixels (or spot area).
Here is where the method fails. There is no assurance or even analysis to to show that that SSN is what Wolf would have assigned, hence the LSC is uncalibrated.
Nothing arbitrary about it, just that SOHO Continuum makes for much simpler task of finding a workable intensity due to image consistency.
None of this matters because you have no idea what SSN wolf would have assigned to that area. In addition you pretend that that is close to what Wolf would have reported for observations he did not make.
Actually, none of it matters to what I track because I don’t do SSN.
Geoff does SSN to keep an eye on what amounts to piling on the counts by certain reporters of SSN.
And, if some day I manage to get ahold of images or drawings that Wolf had access to, I’ll measure them and compare that to the counts he did. But I don’t have that access. Neither do I have access to the drawings of Picard, La Hire, Cassini or Huygens for the Maunder. My understanding is that those notes are largely lost.
Let me make that last point clear:
LSC needs only access to drawings or images to calibrate to Wolf/Wolferer.
We did a check against Debrecen, and found it to be accurate to within 10%.
It’s not like we did not try.
So please dispense with the junk status finding.
Ninderthana,
Here is just a limited sampling of some of the words/phrases you chose to direct at Dr. Leif Svalgaard .
– – – – – – – – – –
Ninderthana,
My perception is that Dr. Leif Svalgaard is engaged in relentless discussion and criticism here. There is nothing wrong with strenuous argument; this is a very open venue. (thanks Anthony) I personally learn from it and value it immeasurably.
You are rather inappropriate, to say the very least, in your commentary.
Why don’t you just personally reveal, in your own words, your science that shows Dr. Svalgaard’s science is making “mistakes”?
John
Predicting a single number between 0 and 150, in any large group of people someone is bound to get it right.
Predicting complete sequence is a totally different matter. No one has bettered this one yet:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC2.htm
the basic equation was writhen in 2003 (http://xxx.lanl.gov/ftp/astro-ph/papers/0401/0401107.pdf ), here compared to the actual solar magnetic field. No L&P or the flux F10 ambiguity, just direct daily measurements.
It tells what the sun is doing and why.
Thanks Leif, I see that you did indeed expect a reduced cycle 24 as compared to previous cycles. This is what your conclusion said:
“We find that solar cycle average B increased
by 25% between the 1900s (cycle 14) and the 1950s
(cycle 19) and is now again becoming smaller. This
behavior stands in contrast to the more than doubling of
B during the 20th century obtained from an analysis of the
aa index by Lockwood et al. [1999]. If the coming cycle
24 is as small as predicted (peak RZ = 75 [Svalgaard et
al., 2005])”
However I don’t thjink you are quite out of the wood with that. Landscheldt theory provides both a mechanism and an expectation that the decline for cycle 24 and subsequent cycles would be severe. Your expectation of decline is derived solely from pattern watching and no proposed mechanism.
So the results so far are:
i) Hathaway et al are way out with no reasonable excuse.
ii) You are right in general terms but weak on reasoning and you failed to see the extent of the cycle 24 collapse. You expected it to get to 75 but NASA has now revised down to 58 and even that looks optimistic.
iii)Landscheldt theory seems to have got it pretty much spot on.
I don’t have a horse in this race. Just a neutral observer.
vuk,
Yes, those charts and equations are looking good.
rbateman says:
February 10, 2011 at 8:02 pm
It was you who got us started, as you said it was a good idea.
Thanks Robert, I am glad you also remember the deleted forum messages from http://www.solarcycle24.com where Leif was full of phrase of the LSC which he later denied.
I see that forum has since died.
Keep up the good fight.
It seems we like too much in America to beat up on those who make an earnest effort to break through these barriers put in place by those who want to believe that less than one percent of our atmosphere is raising the Earth’s Temperature.
It seems to me we are in some type of dark age where we are stuck with religions and governments and blog critics that say science is settled and science might as well be said to be dead.
As pointed out yesterday in this tread, by Brent Hargreaves future generations will look back….
What we have to our benefit is since Copenhagen 2009 UN Conference, the leak of Climate Gate Emails and the slow demise of the US liberal parties there is now more information on the table. In reading Leif Svalgaard commentaries and answers I now see a higher way of looking at sunspot cycles and I would have to add, I would have to read this his comments a few times to fully grasp what he is saying. I use simple sunspot numeric numbers and averages to reach what appears to be the same conclusions.
I watched the hearings nearly A year
ago with Lord M. taking on three other scientists of our nemesis, the IPCC, and I saw that the hearing was stacked against him by the liberal party members. What impressed me was a learned man, boned up on reading and data, stood his ground. Next to him, a lady scientist who studied tree rings testified in the hearing that it was obvious the earth was in a warmer period before the mini-ice age. It went right over everyone’s head. She basically said the Earth can be warmed up without man’s help. No one caught it.
Now, before I close, I have seen enough information out there that if the sciences of tree ring research, the various climate sciences came together, we could create within a reasonable “guess”, just how warm the earth was within a few degrees and how much sunspot activity was present.
For example, the periods of drought tend to fall on the years at the end and start of sunspot cycles. Go find in the history books where all the droughts took place. They are even mentioned in the Old Testament stories.
This period of drought is marked by high heat. For example, 1934 was the most noted year of the Dust Bowl, and had some of the highest heat noted, but fell on a very low sunspot year.
Another observation recently noted by a scientists is Drought Periods are marked by floods and it is blamed on the dust created by the drought. This all surrounds the drop in upper atmosphere humidity due to the drop in sunspot activity.
Concerning temperatures during sunspot cycles. US average temperatures only.
Annual temperatures for the cooler cycles in the past century range from 54 to 54.43. The cycles that had a sharp peak at the start and had a total average for the cycle above 600, had an average temperature above 55.49.
The Glacier in the Fjord of Glacier Bay melted twice as fast in the warmer cycles of the past century as the cooler ones before 1933.
As a thumb measurement, above 55 degrees F the glaciers at the latitude of glacier bay melt twice as fast as the cooler cycles when the Average USA temperatures are below 55.49.
Finally, when the USA average winter temperatures are above 33 degrees F, there are more storms. From 1890 to 2007, hurricane numbers nearly doubled. The average hurricane season in 1890s had about 5 storms a year. By the end of 2007, we had average of 10 storms a year.
Niagara Falls Froze over in 1911.
The numbers are there, we just have to
fined those numbers. We can build the climate matrix, but everything must be on the table. That’s not happening in this climate science dark age.
Most Sincerely,
Paul Pierett,
rbateman says:
February 10, 2011 at 11:48 pm
Actually, none of it matters to what I track because I don’t do SSN.
Then you are not commenting on the LSC at all.
Geoff does SSN to keep an eye on what amounts to piling on the counts by certain reporters of SSN.
The SSN is not inflated, but rather undercounted by SIDC.
The issue is not whether counting pixels on SOHA/SDI is valid. It is. What I point out is that turning them into a SSN the way it is done leads to junk.
And, if some day I manage to get ahold of images or drawings that Wolf had access to, I’ll measure them and compare that to the counts he did.
There are no drawings for the Dalton Minimum. The drawings by Staudacher have been digitized by Arlt.
rbateman says:
February 10, 2011 at 11:54 pm
We did a check against Debrecen, and found it to be accurate to within 10%.
It’s not like we did not try. So please dispense with the junk status finding.
Again, counting pixels will work [and is a strawman]. The way the pixel count is turned into a SSN is junk.
John Whitman says:
February 10, 2011 at 11:55 pm
You are rather inappropriate, to say the very least, in your commentary.
Reveals more about him that about me…
But I resent discussion of my person.
Stephen Wilde says:
February 11, 2011 at 1:22 am
Landscheldt theory provides both a mechanism and an expectation that the decline for cycle 24 and subsequent cycles would be severe. Your expectation of decline is derived solely from pattern watching and no proposed mechanism.
Shows your ignorance about this. My prediction is based on the measured polar fields and the solar dynamo. Landscheidt has no mechanism at all.
Geoff Sharp says:
February 11, 2011 at 2:52 am
Thanks Robert, I am glad you also remember the deleted forum messages from http://www.solarcycle24.com where Leif was full of praise of the LSC which he later denied.
I see you are economical with the truth here. Counting pixels is OK. The way you try to turn it into a SSN is junk, always was, always will be. You can’t run away from that.
I see that forum has since conveniently died.
Geoff Sharp says: February 11, 2011 at 2:52 am
……………………
Hi Geoff, Mr. Bateman
Any web-blog determined to censor views in line with the ‘science is settled’ will eventually pay price.
vukcevic says:
February 11, 2011 at 5:05 am
Any web-blog determined to censor views in line with the ‘science is settled’ will eventually pay price.
Any web-blog that allows pollution by pseudo-science [other than for entertainment] will eventually pay the price.
Leif Svalgaard says: February 10, 2011 at 6:59 pm
……….
Vuk often does the same. Such discussion could be educational, but must, of course, be done in a sober, measured, and scientifically correct way [granted that those things are hard for some]
Hey, what’s that about? Ok, my poetry may be lousy, but I was defending you in my previous post . I did said I learned a lot. I even quote you on ‘the most important theoretical solar science’s discovery of 21st century’ up to date that is, as you can clearly see here :
@rbateman
> Geoff’s method is very adept at grabbing the whole spot area, and is more
> precise than that used by NOAA. To the nearest 10 x 10E6 is a kludge. Now
> go and look at http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/latest/DSD.txt and
> specifically this line:
> 2011 01 14 79 11 0 0 -999 A9.3 2 0 0 0 0 0 0
Is that what this endless arguing is about? Coping with ‘zeros’ in the data?
True, you shouldn’t be using this measure as a substitute for area. Zero is a bad-boy in algebra because there is no practical inverse to multiplication by zero. It’s more like an index, like Kp (geomagnetic planetary K index), which also admits zero as value. [And you shouldn’t be using Kp for averaging or ratios because it’s logarithmic (that’s why they invented Ap).] In effect, this area count denotes area as categorical variable, ordered by size.
> WUWT? The nearest 10E6 rounds to zero, because somebody decided a
> long time ago to sacrifice precision for ease.
[That should be 10E-6 of course]. This measure is equivalent to estimating the unknown area of a solar active region from its pixel count representation on an image, rendered such that the entire solar disk comprises exactly 1 million pixels.
Fixing this problem is not as easy as rescaling to 10 or 100 million pixels, or using a fractional representation, because it would ‘break’ hundreds or thousands of applications and tools around the world, that depend on an exact integer representation. Not all applications are harmed by the zeros, if they’re interpreted as merely the smallest category of area size.
The simplest ‘fix’ (without creating a new metric) would be to apply some kind of ‘additive smoothing’, maybe something as simple as Laplace’s rule of succession which is merely to add 1 to each observation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudocount
On the issue of calibration, I tend to agree with Leif that the published solar images don’t appear to be calibrated (e.g. energy per pixel), but more like ‘adjusted for best viewing’. Detecting pixels over such uncalibrated thresholds would certainly introduce some uncertainty about the results. There at least needs to be some analysis to quantify that uncertainty.
Geoff Sharp says:
February 11, 2011 at 2:52 am
Thanks Robert, I am glad you also remember the deleted forum messages from http://www.solarcycle24.com where Leif was full of praise of the LSC which he later denied.
Geoff: I stand with you on what we did and why we did it.
We were not the only ones who noticed strange reporting and decided to do sanity checks. Other groups went as far as lodging protests to SIDC over what amounts to selective adjusting and submission times. Apparently, feathers got ruffled in the exchanges. Too bad.
I have no regrets over the honest effort we put forth.
It looks to me like the sunspots that are appearing in the past two weeks are even more faded or washed out, even when they are at the strongest of their appearance. Does L&P effect theory describes this gradual change as Gauss drops? This would place the current grand minimum in the Maunder little ice age category, NOT Dalton, which would cause sunspots to disappear completely, maybe even this year? Zoom in on today’s sunspot 1056, it had a little black yesterday which mostly faded quick, but it still has a core to it: http://spaceweather.com/
vukcevic says:
February 11, 2011 at 6:18 am
Hey, what’s that about?
“Here I end my posts on this thread. Thank you for your cooperation.”
rbateman says:
February 11, 2011 at 8:00 am
I have no regrets over the honest effort we put forth.
The LSC is still junk for the many reasons I have pointed out.
Terry says:
February 11, 2011 at 8:31 am
It looks to me like the sunspots that are appearing in the past two weeks are even more faded or washed out, even when they are at the strongest of their appearance. Does L&P effect theory describes this gradual change as Gauss drops?
Two weeks are too short to mean much, but the appearance of the spots is consistent with L&P.
****
Geoff Sharp says:
February 10, 2011 at 5:13 pm
Any discussion with you is completely pointless. I will leave others to make their own judgment.
****
OK, but you asked for it. 🙂
As someone without a dog in the fight, I find Leif’s work & posts convincing. From his work and my own ideas, the sun (concerning the earth’s climate) is a constant-temp “billiard ball” and earth’s climate variations are internally generated. Obviously that includes effects of orbital parameter/precession changes, but that has nothing to do with intrinsic solar changes.
For me, that pares away alot of junk & allows focusing on the real climate-change causes.
beng said:
“From his (Leif Svalgaard’s) work and my own ideas, the sun (concerning the earth’s climate) is a constant-temp “billiard ball” and earth’s climate variations are internally generated. ”
I’ve considered that possibility. Certainly a lot of short term changes (less than centuries) are internally generated by the oceans but when one gets to 500 to 1000 year timescales I’m having difficulty limiting the changes observed to internal variations alone.
And then there is that correlation between sun and climate from MWP to LIA to date plus many regional climate shifts all around the world as the climate zones shifted poleward and then back equatorward again in tune (on longer timescales but often not on shgort timescales) with changes in levels of solar activity.
Then during the late 20th century with an active sun we saw poleward/zonal jets and a warming world but quite likely the opposite now and possibly equatorward/meridional jets persisting into the future for just so long as the sun remains less active.
Then there is the issue as to how to define ‘internal’.
If as I suspect the climate changes are system responses to changes in the mix of wavelengths and particles from the sun then that would still qualify as ‘internal’ because it is features of the Earth system that respond to small solar changes rather than the solar changes being significant in themselves.
So if the Earth system is highly sensitive to solar input then that is an internal characteristic of the system is it not?
Note however that the Earth system response to ANY forcing is always negative. If any forcing tries to increase temperature then the climate shifts push energy out to space faster. If any forcing tries to reduce temperature then the climate shifts reduce the rate at which energy is allowed out to space.
The reason being that the ocean bulk temperature (for any given level of solar input) is pressure and density dependent so the air always has to respond negatively to any change in the balance between sea surface and surface air temperatures however induced.
The whole issue seems to boil down to the global albedo and the amount of solar energy getting past the clouds and into the oceans.
For whatever reason that does seem to respond to solar activity levels rather than to raw TSI.
If it is a matter of atmospheric chemistry rather than radiative physics then that solves quite a few issues and that, I think, is where the conundrum can be resolved.
Here’s the best reading you can have at the moment. Take a look at the Geissberg’s cycle graphs
http://www.cdejager.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/2010-Variable-solar-dynamo3.pdf
Leif,
Any bold predictions for SC25?
RICH says:
February 11, 2011 at 11:22 am
Any bold predictions for SC25?
Statistically it should be a small cycle. Since the polar fields are not known for SC25 we can’t do any better than that.
Leif Svalgaard says: February 11, 2011 at 1:27 pm
Since the polar fields are not known for SC25 we can’t do any better than that.
Not known, but we have a good idea what they might be, don’t we?
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC2.htm
About 60, which is ½ of the current max.