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
Well, I have no idea if this guy’s theory is good but, I love the ‘Layman’s Sunspot Count”.
http://www.landscheidt.info/?q=node/50
The whole sc24 will be like this. And it will be very, very long. Next minimum not before 2020/21.
It will get much colder than in 1960s/70s. Sea level and atmospheric CO2 will decrease, sea ice and glaciers will increase. There will be food problems worldwide.
Can it be that modern people in Western countries, lacking any firmly established system of beliefs, are falling back to their ancient Celtic and Germanic instincts? Their lemming-like striving for cruel mass sacrifices intended to propitiate the unpredictable forces of Nature, their worship of trees and animals, their intense and fearful interest in seismic events, in weather changes, and in the condition of the Sun… There is something decidedly druidic in it all.
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/hmi_igr/1024/latest.html
As of this post, the link shows two small spots for 1234. SSNs will go up and down over the months. Anybody looking at SSN and 10.7 charts knew the values would go up and down. The 13-month average is better compared to the official prediction. See http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/weekly/README3 for smoothing calculation details. Hathaway has a new prediction this month. See http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/predict.shtml.
Jay Curtis says: June 13, 2011 at 6:58 am
Jay here are some of the past predictions:
http://i55.tinypic.com/iyontj.jpg blink comparison
http://i53.tinypic.com/23stdzk.jpg static, sans April 2011, which is exactly the same line as Sept 2010
lgl says:
June 13, 2011 at 5:47 am (Edit)
John Finn & Tallbloke
“The sensitivity of climate to cyclical variations in solar forcing will be higher for longer cycles due to the thermal inertia of the ocean, which acts to damp high frequencies. Using a phenomenological approach, Scafetta and West (2005) found that the climate was 1.5 times as sensitive to 22 year cyclical forcing relative to 11 year cyclical forcing, and that the thermal inertial induced a lag of approximately 2.2 years in cyclic climate response in the temperature data.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation
LIke always, lag a little less than 1/4 of the forcing cycle time.
Paul Vaughan says:
June 13, 2011 at 7:02 am (Edit)
@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 .
You are both partially correct. There are some solar effects on the climate which take time to manifest, e.g. the bigger El Nino’s,which don’t start until solar minimum, releasing a chunk of the heat absorbed into the ocean during the higher part of the solar cycle and (take note John Finn) hidden from the surface record in the sub-surface Pacific Warm Pool. There are other solar effects which are almost instantaneous; e.g. the small el-nino events which quickly follow sharp temporary downturns in solar activity levels near the peak of the solar cycle.
All but one EL Nino event in the last 60 years has *started* (i.e. when SOI rises above zero), *after* the peak of the solar cycle. The one that started before the peak was just after a brief sharp downturn in activity shortly before the actual peak SSN occurred in 1958
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/ssn-soi-split.jpg
Undoubtedly there is some way to count sunspots by staring at tree rings. Where’s Michael Mann when you really need him? /sarc
R. Gates says:
June 13, 2011 at 7:32 am
“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.”
Let me get this straight. According to R.Gates:
I should be afraid of a harmless non-toxic trace gas in the atmosphere that makes plants grow better and use less water as its concentration increases. A gas which for most of the earth’s history has been in concentrations ten times that of today. A gas which might also help extend growing seasons in higher latitudes through warmer nights and milder winters.
But as far as unusual activity in the huge blazing violent fusion inferno in the sky called the sun, activity that correlates with cold periods in recent history where people were starving because the unusual cold was killing crops, I shouldn’t worry about that.
Really? That’s your story and you’re sticking with it?
Amazing.
The red “prediction” line represents the smoothed average of sunspots. If the actual count continues to bounce up to the “prediction” line, then fall back, bounce up, and fall back, then the smoothed average for these months will come in somewhere below the “prediction” line.
(BTW, it still takes several minutes between logging in, and the system allowing me to actually make a comment.)
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.”
Technically we’ve been in an ice age for 3 million years. The current ice age is characterized by cyclical advances and retreats of glaciers where they advance and dominate for about 100,000 years and then retreat for 10,000 years. They have been in retreat for about 10,000 years now and are due to begin their advance.
The reason the transition can be so rapid is that the global ocean has a shallow warm surface layer with an average temperature of 16C while the bulk of it (90% of its volume) is a rather constant 3C. Any significant perturbation towards a colder global average temperature right now can drain that shallow surface layer of its stored warmth and turn the whole ocean, instead of just the lower 90% of it, into an ice bath. Land surface temperatures of course ultimately follow ocean surface temperature upwards and downwards in characteristic way where land surface temperatures get higher than ocean temperature in the summer and colder in the winter. The relationship between land and ocean surface temperatures is called “continentality” and was so named hundreds of years ago.
Interestingly it isn’t colder winters which make glaciers advance. It’s colder summers that do the trick. Once the permafrost starts moving towards lower latitudes because the summer isn’t warm enough to melt it the effect snowballs because permafrost breeds more permafrost through snow and ice reflecting the warming rays of the sun. So watch out for lower average summer temperatures in higher latitudes as that will be the mark the beginning of the undoing of our civilization. As long average summer temperatures in higher latitudes rise thank your lucky stars because that’s a very, very good thing.
There may have been a once in millions-of-years mode change.
In any case, I had prematurely stated, last week, that the the rainy season in the southern part of Norcal was over. As it turned out, the cold front on Saturday dropped trace of rainfall. But going forward, it does appear the Pacific High may finally be moving poleward, bringing the dry season. We’ll see.
re: Adam Gallon 6/13 7:27
The problem with the old counts was not the quality of the instrument but the lack of a rigorous procedure and constant regular observation & recording (which started with Wolf and Schwabe in the early 19th century).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helioscope
Well, there is still some minor amounts of rain today in San Mateo.
Dave Springer said:
Oh no, I am sure you’re wrong. R Gates tells us that it is the acceleration of the hydrological cycle because of anthropogenic stepping on the CO2 gas pedal that causes the problems and that in consequence, higher summer temperatures are worse than lower summer temperatures and that they drive the oceans, or something.
Jean Parisot says:
June 13, 2011 at 6:48 am
“If we can’t see a sunspot does it matter?”
IMO the hidden spots don’t matter much except that because we know about them, we can be pretty certain that the instantaneous SSN today of 16 is not representative of the sun’s condition. We should expect that when the daily numbers are eventually averaged, we’ll see a Sun Spot Number for June 2011 a lot higher than 16. If we didn’t know about them, we’d assume that our single sample was typical of the present state of the sun.
I could be wrong about that BTW. I am not a practicing sun-spot-ologist.
A
Paul
I can’t find the evidence.
I have produced a graph showing rather low (for many may be too low and unacceptable) (non) correlation between CET and SSN.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-SSN.htm
Since as far as I know this is first time that such graph has been constructed, any comments on purely technical grounds (the basic principle employed, error in the approach etc) are welcome and will be taken into account if justifiable.
To any of the climate experts (regularly posting here) if they so whish, I will make available the excel file for a thorough reassessment.
In southern Ontario, Canada we are experiencing cold October weather in June, cloudy and rain every day. This is almost identical to the summer of 2009. The summer and winter of 2010 was great due to El Niño, agricultural yields for 2011 are expected to be half of 2010’s output. We better pray CO2 can mitigate the lack of solar activity as the last El Nino was contingent on the last solar max.
@Dave Springer says: June 13, 2011 at 8:42 am
You have stated the scary parts that keep R. Gates head in the sand.
Fit_Nick says:
June 13, 2011 at 7:41 am
the original Wolf method, devised by Rudolf Wolf back in the 17th century , the time of the Dalton Minimum, […]
http://www.landscheidt.info/?q=node/50
Rudolf Wolf [1816-1893] did not observed during the Dalton Minimum. Here is Wolf’s reconstruction of the sunspot number at that time: http://www.leif.org/research/Wolf-SSN-for-SC5.png He had that cycle to be medium, not a Grand Minimum cycle. His successor Wolfer in 1902 decreased the size of cycle 5 by about a factor of two, thus in effect creating the Dalton minimum. The Layman’s sunspot count lacks calibration and is junk and certainly does not represent what Wolf thought cycle 5 was like [apart from the fact that Wolf was not even born and thus did not observe the cycle, so the claim that LSC ‘restores’ Wolf’s method is false].
———————–
Sunspot cycles proceed in ‘spurts’. These are particularly visible in weak cycles, e.g. cycle 14 and [now] cycle 24: http://www.leif.org/research/SC-14-and-24.png
The yellow curve is the daily sunspot number, the pink is the 27-day mean, and the black the yearly mean. So, we might expect similar spurts this time around.
The behavior of this Solar Cycle has yet to change: It’s all bark and no bite. The spots are too wimpy far too often.
I tried posting the news about the Northern Polar Coronal Hole showing signs of re-forming several times this past week. That was a hint. It’s now rotating off the limb in STEREO AHEAD.
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 13, 2011 at 10:50 am
Sunspot cycles proceed in ‘spurts’. These are particularly visible in weak cycles, e.g. cycle 14 and [now] cycle 24: http://www.leif.org/research/SC-14-and-24.png
The yellow curve is the daily sunspot number, the pink is the 27-day mean, and the black the yearly mean. So, we might expect similar spurts this time around.
Hi Leif, please could you tell us more about the way f10.7 radio flux has been calibrated to the sunspot number in your graph. Does it use the downward curve you calculated for the relationship that I saw recently. If so, could you link that for us again.
Thanks
tallbloke says:
June 13, 2011 at 11:55 am
Hi Leif, please could you tell us more about the way f10.7 radio flux has been calibrated to the sunspot number in your graph.
In order not to open another can of worms, the F10.7 flux was only calibrated using data from cycle 24, i.e. from 2009 on. I’ll keep this graph up to date going forward.
Dave Springer says:
June 13, 2011 at 8:42 am
The reason the transition can be so rapid is that the global ocean has a shallow warm surface layer with an average temperature of 16C while the bulk of it (90% of its volume) is a rather constant 3C. Any significant perturbation towards a colder global average temperature right now can drain that shallow surface layer of its stored warmth and turn the whole ocean, instead of just the lower 90% of it, into an ice bath.
Well, not quite. The dropoff in temperature from the underside of the mixed surface layer to the thermocline is fairly linear, so there is a lot of energy stored in the top 700M of ocean, considering the top 2m has as much heat capacity as the entire atmosphere, and a hyperactive late C20th sun stored plenty of extra energy there. Plenty to keep the atmosphere warm for a good while even if the sun stays this quiet for two cycles. Sure we will see some cold winters, but I don’t think we’re in rapid glaciation territory. For another thing, the orbital/orientation cycles aren’t anywhere near the right stage for glaciation.
If the Sun stays at this level of activity, I forecast a drop of 0.3-0.5C in SST over the next 20 years, allowing for a few more biggish volcanoes.
Is this the Livingston & Penn effect?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/02/livingston-and-penn-paper-sunspots-may-vanish-by-2015/
REPLY: No there will be more sunspots this year, the L&P effect is gradual…don’t expect it to drop of in contrast until around 2015-2017 – Anthony
vukcevic says: “I have produced a graph showing rather low (for many may be too low and unacceptable) (non) correlation between CET and SSN. http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-SSN.htm Since as far as I know this is first time that such graph has been constructed, any comments on purely technical grounds (the basic principle employed, error in the approach etc) are welcome and will be taken into account if justifiable.”
It’s wiggle matching, so it’s problematic. Have you tried taking the derivative of the SSN and plotting it against CET?