This is strange. Usually we see the geomagnetic Ap Index increase with increasing sunspots and 10.7 cm radio flux. But the Ap index (the third graph below) has crashed to the third lowest level since January 2000, matching what it was a year ago. This is the second month of decline, and the decline is steep.
Maybe Livingston and Penn are right and while sunspots may still occur, they’ll be mostly invisible to observers due to low magnetic flux. This may be what happened during the Maunder Minimum.
Here’s the L&P plots of Umbral Intensity and Magnetic Field. Once the Umbral magnetic field gets below 1500 gauss, sunspots will no longer be visible.
Graphs from Dr. Leif Svalgaard – Click the pic to view at source
Be sure to bookmark WUWT’s Solar reference page: http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/solar/
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I will propose a reason for the decrease in magnetic field intensity.
Hydrogen moves toward the surface of the Sun’s core to be consumed. Since the hydrogen is completely ionized, this electrical current creates the Sun’s magnetic fields. A quiet [less energetic] Sun has less hydrogen movement; therefore, a decrease in magnetic field strength.
In recent history, since 1650 until 2000, the Sun’s output has been increasing, this has depleted the hydrogen near the core and expanded the volume [due to heat] near the core’s surface. As the internal heat decreases the volume near the core surface will decrease; the decrease in volume will draw hydrogen back to the core’s surface [for burning] re-energizing the Sun. This process takes 20 to 50 years as per the time interval 1620 to 1670.
OK – Jump on.
This discussion has uncovered a flaw in my thinking. If Leif Svalgaard says something related to the sun, I believe it unquestioningly. That is patently unscientific and akin to hero worship.
It seems that is the primrose path to “religious science”, I wish he would say something stupid and free me from this mind trap!
Leif, you are brilliant but screw you and your rightness. /Sarc
I don’t think the sun is likely to affect tides, however, circulation is another story.
Pamela Gray says: …..
Pamela your sense of humor is showing…..
Thanks for the chuckle.
I would be very curious to know if Leif has moderated his opinion at all about the climate significance of the Cheshire Cat sunspots. Someone must explain to me the Maunder Minimum’s ‘large, sparse, and primarily southern hemispheric sunspots’.
====================
“MattE says: December 6, 2011 at 6:05 pm
Don’t go to the quack site listed in the top post. Small bit of real science mixed with a whole lot of crazy. ”
Darn it Matt now I have to go and read it 🙂
To summarize for others, the sun is doing strange things, we have no idea why, it may be important in our lifetime, it may not. We may be doomed soon or in a billion years or so. We really are just crawling and not even walking when it comes to our understanding of the sun.
Before I went to work this-morning I read this article and comments, I was thinking about this all day, I have lots of questions, Why is it that at various times of low sun spot activity as in the 10.7 cm radio flux chart between 2006 and 2011 did we experience harsher winters and La Nina’s (including what is known as the BIG FREEZE)? and why is it that during the various times of recorded maximum sun spot activity above 160 sfu do we have milder winters?
Do these prolonged cycles cause ice ages mini-ice ages and prolonged warming periods?
If the sun can cause prolonged periods of cooling why is it not considered as being the cause of long periods of warming? to me the correlation is there if nothing else.
It’s as if some activist climate scientists got together in the 1980s and looked at these cycles and realized that the rest of the 20th century would see heightened maximum in solar activity and predicted a period of global warming and it was immediately adapted as a “cause” for various political and environmental activism and financial interests.
Where I live all that I have to do is look at a these charts judge for myself where in the cycle the sun was and I’d get a very good understanding of what conditions to expect.
(Leif if your going to replay to me and tell me how wrong I am, remember I’m not an expert on climate terminology, so understanding my point will probably involve a little common sense, which seems to be in short supply these days lol 🙂 )
For
Richard111 says:
December 6, 2011 at 11:58 pm
Use the following link.
http://sohodata.nascom.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/data_query
I prefer the MDI Continuum view. Note that the dates must be in the form yyyy-mm-dd.
I see a multitude of comments, but all this is vain, without the right causes of these phenomena.
There are anybody who can defeat own vanity and accept an offer for a resolving this phenomenon for all times.Well what don’t exist anybody in scientific world who do desires to know
the right true about the right causes of all cycles of sunspots?
I can help in it with my discoveries.I offer a collaboration and will be OK.INDEED
I am waiting the answer and THANKS in advanced.
REGARDS,
Milovic Nikola, dipl.ing. energ.
There are a large number of sunspots currently but most are quite small, and all seem to be decreasing in size and magnetic complexity, which would indicate to me that the Ap index is continuing to crash. If the trend continues, we should see a reduction in sunspots (both number and size) soon. http://www.solarham.com has some great charts, graphs, and pictures all in one handy reference, though there are plenty of other sites to get the same information as well.
Nikola, that was pretty vauge.
How do you propose to discover “the right true about the right causes of all cycles of sunspots” (I assume you mean “the root cause for all sunspots/ sunspot cycles”).?
It’s been tried, what makes your method better?
Sparks says:
December 7, 2011 at 9:04 am
Before I went to work this-morning I read this article and comments, I was thinking about this all day, I have lots of questions….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The sun is just one factor. A main factor in Ice Ages is the orientation of the earth in relation to the sun and the location of the continents and oceans. Not to mention factors like clouds, volcanoes…
Milankovitch Cycles Explained: http://deschutes.gso.uri.edu/~rutherfo/milankovitch.html
Milankovitch theory: history: http://corior.blogspot.com/2006/02/part-15-ice-ages-confirmed.html
A quick background to the last ice age: http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nerc130k.html
WUWT article: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/30/the-antithesis/
Continental Drift and Climate: http://www3.geosc.psu.edu/courses/Geosc320/Campbell_Cont_Drift_Climate.pdf
For what it’s worth, I don’t think the Sun is at max yet, because as Vukcevic points out the polar fields are not converging to zero. I do think we’ve just had a local maximum, perhaps instigated by the Sun-Earth-Jupiter alignment with Jupiter near perihelion, that it will go down a bit and then back up again in 2013. After that, the loooong decline…
Rich.
Three ways solar activity can affect ocean circulation.
1. The cloud effect. The cloud effect is believed to be strongest at mid latitudes and over oceans.
2. Ionization of molecules in fluids by cosmic rays.
3. Changes in our magnetic field influencing polarized and ionized molecules.
Sunspots numbers go up, and sunspot numbers go down.
A brief look at the Maunder minimum shows how the sunspot numbers staggers …
@ur momisugly Rich Apuzzo
Thank you for the link. I set the range between 2005/01/01 up today. In my opinion the chart suggests that we have already passed the solar maximum…
Fascinating information. If you don’t mind my asking… How is Solar Wind measured?
@Gail Combs do you know of any programs/simulations of solar activity or Milankovitch Cycles or similar?
Preferably opengl with source. It would be interesting to code a program like that with known cyclonic parameters such as solar activity, real time sun spots, magnetic poles and barycenter etc… any of the software I’ve used has only had the basic parameters of phases and orbits etc, gets kinda boring.
I wrote a program a fue years ago to plot and rotate some constellations to get an Idea of the actual positions of the stars in relation to each-other, and it was an eye opener to see groups of stars from different orientations and to see some stars that are in the same constellation actually being nowhere near each-other. So maybe a program like this of the sun with parameters to play around with would give a similar insight.
Sparks says:
December 7, 2011 at 2:08 pm
@Gail Combs do you know of any programs/simulations of solar activity or Milankovitch Cycles or similar?…
__________________
Sorry no. I am “Computer challenged”
VUKCEVIC might have something though or know where you could find it. He will probably post again here shortly.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/
Yes, I have tried to make that point. We had 500 years of cooler temperatures with the LIA. It takes a while to warm things up. It believe it is probably still recovering.
I believe the same. It is much easier to cool the ocean than it is to warm it from temperature changes at the surface.
That is fairly easy to accomplish if you don’t have any glacial periods for a few hundred million years. We are a few million years into an ice age on earth so the oceans will be colder.
It might also be the reason why we shifted from 40ky glacial cycles to 100ky glacial cycles. When we had the first glacial periods the oceans had a lot more heat so we could come out of the glacial into an interglacial a little easier. In fact, looking at the ice core data it seems to me that even in the more recent glacial period we do see it try to warm up roughly every 40k years but it just never makes it. This last glacial looks to me (from the data I am looking at right now) to be the longest of the glacial period in the most recent sequence of four and we only came out of it on the THIRD 40k bump, we missed two of them (earlier glacial periods missed one). I would say we might be seeing a transition from 100k year glacials to something longer.
TomB says:
December 7, 2011 at 12:43 pm
Fascinating information. If you don’t mind my asking… How is Solar Wind measured?
I am not an expert on the hardware involved but I use the data from the ACE satellite which measures a whole host of metrics linked to the solar wind. The Caltech website has some background info.
http://www.srl.caltech.edu/ACE/
I came across this slide show in PDF form last night. It’s some research done by David Lund in an MIT/Woods Hole project. Notice starting on page 6 where they start to document changes during the LIA in the Dry Tortugas. Sea surface temperatures there increased (decreased trade winds?), salinity increased, calcite increased, O18 increased. The ITCZ migrated South (so the storm tracks moved South, too, meaning less precipitation) NADW might have switched “off” or greatly slowed, Note on page 14 the correlation with the various solar minima of the time.
This supports some other papers I dug up recently that show the ITCZ generally migrating South over a multi-millennial time scale following the decline of solar insolation in the Northern Hemisphere. It reached its peak Northern location around 9000 year ago, started drifting South over time, about 5000 years ago it apparently started more rapid migration South.
At about the same time we see rapid onset of very long drought in the Levant and Arabian Peninsula and probably elsewhere and generally monsoons have become shorter, too.
Note also the number of 13th century ruins we find ( why did the Anasazi abruptly leave Chaco Canyon?) indicate that climate change might not have been limited to Europe in the LIA. A migration of the ITCZ would have resulted in a change in monsoonal flows in India and the Southwest US.
There was apparently a pretty major drought in the 1400’s to 1600’s in the US Southwest: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/drought/images/grissno.jpg but that one around AD 400 looks like it was a monster drought lasting nearly 200 years. At Moon Lake, North Dakota we see just the opposite. Very dry conditions until the LIA and relatively wet conditions since so there was some major atmospheric circulation change (or the data are being misinterpreted).
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/drought/images/laird.gif
>>Scorle says: December 7, 2011 at 3:31 am
>>So the sun is behaving strange, maybe that is the reason fot the
>>extreme temperatures in Europe?
Our warm weather in Europe has nothing to do with Global Warming, and everything to do with our northern jetstreams (and thus pressure systems) being a little out of phase in comparison with ‘normal’ years.
Normally for this time of year, the low pressures spiral further south. Indeed, the last two years they went much too far south, and we ended up with bitter winters. This year, the low pressures are still spiralling in their autumn latitudes, over Scotland, and have not yet gone south – hence the very mild SW airstream to W Europe (but bitterly cold weather in Turkey and the East).
But I might be bold enough to suggest that the lows will have run out of energy soon, and start to drift further south into the Mediterranean, and so the UK will get its cold weather in Jan and Feb. This trend is still weather, rather than climate, but it it does this for ten years, then it is a part of the ever-changing climate pattern, and northern Europe will feel a winter chill.
.
How do I interpret this ?
“So, in their paper, Foster and Rahmstorf tried to separate the signal from the noise. Using statistical techniques (detailed further by Foster here), they factored out the influence of the three biggest known natural mechanisms that can influence global temperatures in the short term — the El Niño oscillation, solar variability and volcanic eruptions. When those are removed, here’s what the graph looks like:
What’s left over is the global warming signal — the bulk of which is caused by humans emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. (There are other smaller factors at play here, too, but previous “attribution” research has found that human activity, El Nino oscillations, solar activities and volcanoes can explain more than three-fourths of temperature variation since 1899.) Moreover, there’s no indication that global warming has slowed at any point. The temperature trend in the raw data gets muted in some years by reduced solar intensity or by a La Niña event, but not every year will be a La Niña year. Greenhouse gases appear to be pushing temperatures inexorably upward…….”.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/is-global-warming-slowing-down-a-new-study-says-no/2011/12/07/gIQAJdKucO_blog.html
crosspatch says:
December 6, 2011 at 11:26 pm
> It looks to me like two frequencies beating against each other that are very close but not exactly the same.
Fascinating theory.
At geological time scales, geological changes also come into play. In this case, much conventional wisdom states that the current sequence of ice ages was triggered by the rise of the Isthmus of Panama which altered sea currents about 3 million years ago. (An example of this is this old article: http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/home95/nov95/iceage.html )
I wonder how much of the above curve (Five_Myr_Climate_Change.svg) might be explained by geological events?