The sun seems not to be in cooperative mood again this month. It has gone blank again.
And from SWPC, the brief upticks of April were not repeated in May:
More info at the WUWT solar page
The sun seems not to be in cooperative mood again this month. It has gone blank again.
And from SWPC, the brief upticks of April were not repeated in May:
More info at the WUWT solar page
Actually, there probably are a fair number of sunspots, but they are all (except 1234) on the side of the sun that is not facing us. The sunspot number may be 16 today, but ten days ago before they started rotating out of sight it was 122. Some of them will likely be back in a week or two.
tallbloke says:
June 13, 2011 at 5:31 am
Heh. Hi John. I could say the same about co2 levels….
I’ve had another try at getting over the relationship between solar activity and El Nino. See what you think:
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2011/06/12/the-timing-of-el-nino-in-relation-to-the-solar-cycle/
Actually, I’m quite open to the idea that solar activity causes ‘shifts’ in global weather patterns – including ENSO. However, that is not the same as a steady rising or falling temperature trend over several decades. This tends to imply a change in the energy balance, i.e. the earth is receiving more than it is losing (warming) or it is losing more than it is receiving (cooling) . Of course, solar activity can be responsible for such changes, but in the absence of any trend over the past 50 or so years and a falling trend over the past 20 years, I am sceptical that the sun is responsible for late 20th century warming.
Maybe if we put all the warmists in a row, and the blow really hard, it might help.
If we stay ENSO-neutral for awhile, which looks to be the most likely case, it should be interesting to see where we are with UAH in a few more months. I have a suspicion it’ll be back in the .2-.3C anomaly range we bounced around in from 2002-2007, which ought to be unsatisfactory to both ends of the AGW-skeptic debate.
BTW if I was a current alarmist in newspaper, media, TV, scientist, organization etc. purposely pushing an agenda that you now know is false, beware of future litigation if you have been shown to be responsible for financial loss etc against the people.
According to my straight line extrapolation, the Sun’s F 10.7 radio flux will go to zero in… your guesed it…2012!
OOPs
/sarc off
That picture has a hypnotic quality …
Actually, there probably are a fair number of sunspots, but they are all (except 1234) on the side of the sun that is not facing us. The sunspot number may be 16 today, but ten days ago before they started rotating out of sight it was 122. Some of them will likely be back in a week or two.
If we can’t see a sunspot does it matter? Does the historic count include spots that had rotated behind the sun – by say not deleting them from the count until three weeks had passed?
There is one thing more interesting than the SUNSPOT COUNT. That would be the NOAA’s predictions of the sunspot number. Am I alone in sensing that the NOAA response to the sunspot number is always in error to the high side?
I think a good control systems engineer ought to chime in on this. (I am a hacker) It seems that the NOAA’s response follows the data but is late and error to one side, typical of an over-damped response. In the vernacular, the NOAA is hesitating making any large changes in its predictions to place the prediction in a lower error state. A low gain response.
Why?
We can gauge the actual graph by knowing that the NOAA prediction is low gain and over damped. In other words, using the NOAA as a transfer function itself… It seems predictable. The last control system work I did was 22 years ago. I could be wrong but my gut says I’m on the right track.
Based on this observation, I predict substantially lower sunspot numbers in 2 years compared with the NOAA prediction.
Hmmm. In view of what is taking place right now, is the “predicted value,” red line in the graph about “sunspot number progression,” still as high as indicated around 2013-14, or should it be flattened some? How often is the curve adjusted? Looks like it should be 20 points lower.
@lgl (June 13, 2011 at 5:47 am), who was addressing John Finn & tallbloke
There’s no lag and there’s no damping of high-frequencies — quite the contrary: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/08/on-the-amopdo-dataset/#comment-678688 .
Eyal Porat, Re: minimum spot size…
That occurred to me as well. Looking at the Maunder minimum data, one must think that the instruments may have limited the count. In fact, one must assume that the count was always skewed low. I doubt the observers would arbitrarily add spots to their count. But I do believe that they’d miss a few.
I bet we are counting many more spots nowadays then previously. AND now we have the chorus, the chorus that roots for every little spot… (I wonder what their motives are?)
I propose recalibrating the sunspot count historically to remove ignorance bias. Maybe we can use Michael Mann’s tree-ring data to adjust the sunspot number. :’)
Maybe we should shoot a rocket full of diet coke into the sun. All that co2 suddenly released will surely cause solar warming and get the sun spots back on track.
Eyal Porat : “The current count in the last few months is around 1- 10 – and very tiny spots at that” and Jean Parisot : “If we can’t see a sunspot does it matter? Does the historic count include spots that had rotated behind the sun”
My understanding is that the sunspot number is simply the number of visible sunspots plus 10 times the number of sunspot groups. So, for example, on June 3 there were 38 spots in 8 groups, for a sunspot number of 118.
I have graphed sunspot number in http://members.westnet.com.au/jonas1/SunspotGraph.JPG
Data from http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpmenu/forecasts/SRS.html
John Finn – sceptical that the sun . . . .
Well that depends on how you define responsible surely. Firstly, if you’re talking about trend in TSI only and a very simple mechanism then actually, you don’t need a rising trend to have rising temps. You just need the imbalance caused by the initial rising trend in the early 20thC to be followed by a sustained period of higher than average cycles. That way the climate system faces each new solar cycle with ‘left over’ energy from the last. Secondly, one might assume that this increasing warmth (from solar activity) would affect the relative strength of positive ENSO events, icemelt/albedo or perhaps increase atmospheric water vapour content. Or perhaps these feedbacks are only reserved for CO2. And finally, I don’t think any of the ‘sun wot did it’ folk think that the mechanism is anything like as simple or direct as you (or I) have described.
This has been a sluggish solar cycle but 2011 is far more active than 2010 and 2012 will be more active still on the way to solarmmax in 2013. Some very active regions about to emerge from the eastern limb of the sun. Expect solar activity to pick up in the next week.
Since the invention and widespread dissemination of the telescope, I’d suggest that the recording of sunspots has been pretty accurate. Even the cheap 50mm/2″ diameter telescopes available from the likes of Tasco, can project a big enough solar disc to count even the smallest sunspot.
I’d certainly say that we’ve 200 years of good sunspot counts, probably even 300 years worth. Something that the keen amateur, gentleman astromomers of old were very good at.
keith at hastings uk says:
June 13, 2011 at 4:56 am
“Small spots were never seen in the old days.”
I think the men that started logging sunspots in the seventeenth century were able to see small sunspots with their crude telescopes. But they were viewing the sun from Europe not space. We observe more sunspots because we never have a cloudy day. Perhaps sometimes they did miss the smallest of the small too -but its not like it was just one guy looking. They really did good science as a whole.
Hansen, et al.: El Sol is a Denier of Global Warming!
John Finn, good morning, you say : “However, that is not the same as a steady rising or falling temperature trend over several decades. This tends to imply a change in the energy balance, i.e. the earth is receiving more than it is losing (warming) or it is losing more than it is receiving (cooling) .”
So where does this “energy” come from? Hello!
Really though… there is no such thing as an “energy balance” on this ever moving, spinning, wobbling, churning, wet, windy, gassy -orbiting -rock we live on and you can’t know what a “decade” or two even looks like down to a fraction of a degree for very small time scales of “several decades” in the past. (500 yrs ago, or 10s of thousands of yrs ago) There is no data resolution that small to look at from geology. For all you know, “rising or falling temperature trends over several decades” happens all the time; even during ice ages; so you can’t claim “unusual” either. We haven’t even reached the natural temperature “high” of the recent past (that had nothing to do with C02 “driving” it) 100,000 yrs ago this planet was much warmer and sea level high stands were almost 20ft higher then now. And 18-12 thousand years ago North America was recovered from ice three miles high. All that ice melted.
Laura Gonzales says:
June 13, 2011 at 6:03 am
Its looking more and more like David Archibald was right. I hope this will be acknowledged. It’s actually very, scary the transition to ice age apparently occurs very rapidly 20 years.
———
We already are in an ice age, we just happen to be in an interglacial period of an ice age. The sun is more active now than at any time in past 3 or 4 years, heading to solar max in 2013. True, the sun is “sluggish” but no need to be scared, really.
Mike Jonas. Nice job on the graph at http://members.westnet.com.au/jonas1/SunspotGraph.JPG
My memory tells me that originally the solar observers projected the disk of the sun onto a piece of paper and drew circles around the spots, as they saw them. On a sunny day, without filters, this must have been blindingly difficult. I’d love to know more about this. Seems that the sunspot count began as a curiosity then later became a serious pursuit.
John Finn says:
June 13, 2011 at 6:19 am (Edit)
tallbloke says:
June 13, 2011 at 5:31 am
I’ve had another try at getting over the relationship between solar activity and El Nino. See what you think:
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2011/06/12/the-timing-of-el-nino-in-relation-to-the-solar-cycle/
Actually, I’m quite open to the idea that solar activity causes ‘shifts’ in global weather patterns – including ENSO. However, that is not the same as a steady rising or falling temperature trend over several decades. This tends to imply a change in the energy balance, i.e. the earth is receiving more than it is losing (warming) or it is losing more than it is receiving (cooling) . Of course, solar activity can be responsible for such changes, but in the absence of any trend over the past 50 or so years and a falling trend over the past 20 years, I am sceptical that the sun is responsible for late 20th century warming.
There hasn’t been a steady rising or falling temperature trend over several decades. There was a series of upward step changes following the redistribution of oceanic heat in El Nino events.
There has been a change in energy balance from pos to neg since 2004.
The Sun affects climate in many many ways. One of them is to cause the ocean to accumulate heat on multidecadal timescales if it is above average activity over an extended period. Which in the later C20th, it was, all the way to 2003.
The original method of counting the spots has changed due to the improvement of capturing the solar image, so the original Wolf method, devised by Rudolf Wolf back in the 17th century , the time of the Dalton Minimum, would not have picked up the tiny spots of today.
To see what his count would have been today you can visit this lovely site which explains the whole concept and methods of the count and gives the original ‘Wolf’ count daily too.
The Wolf count, as of today, has 3 days of no spots.
http://www.landscheidt.info/?q=node/50
Eyal Porat : “The current count in the last few months is around 1- 10 – and very tiny spots at that” and Jean Parisot : “If we can’t see a sunspot does it matter? Does the historic count include spots that had rotated behind the sun”
My understanding is that the sunspot number is simply the number of visible sunspots plus 10 times the number of sunspot groups. So, for example, on June 3 there were 38 spots in 8 groups, for a sunspot number of 118.
I have graphed sunspot number in http://members.westnet.com.au/jonas1/SunspotGraph.JPG
Data from http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpmenu/forecasts/SRS.html
Jay Curtis : “How often is the curve adjusted?”
There have been a number of posts on WUWT on this. Try http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/06/nasas-hathaway-issues-new-solar-cycle-prediction/ or http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/06/nasas-hathaway-issues-new-solar-cycle-prediction/ or http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/27/nasas-sunspot-prediction-roller-coaster/