Solar cycle 24 continues weakly, perhaps weakest of the space-age

Larry Kirk says:
November 7, 2012 at 6:26 pm
why do you think that a Maunder Minimum in the sunspot count would not have any significant effect on the climate?
Simply because of the inconvenient and unpopular truth that the Sun has not varied enough: http://www.leif.org/research/Does%20The%20Sun%20Vary%20Enough.pdf

Project722 says:
November 7, 2012 at 6:53 pm
So why is this noise reading significant? What does the measure tell us? Does it correlate or correspond to other sun related activity?
I expressed that poorly. What I should have said is that any electronic measurement has a background level that is due to e.g. thermal noise in the detector. To get the real signal one must subtract that background. To measure the background level [the ‘dark current’] simply switch off the Sun [put the cover back on the instrument] and see what current you still see. This should not correlate with solar activity for a well-built instrument.

Project722 says:
November 7, 2012 at 7:14 pm
Still…what does the dark current tell us and why is it important?
Imagine you are to go on a flight to some distant place. There is a weight limit of 50 pounds for your suitcase. How do you check that it doesn’t weight too much? What I do is to take the suitcase with one hand and stand on the scale and note the combined weight of the suitcase and me. Then I let go of the suitcase and weight only me. Subtracting my weight from the combined weight of the suitcase and me, gives me the weight of the suitcase. My weight, that I subtract, is the ‘dark current’.

Project722 says:
November 7, 2012 at 7:14 pm
Still…what does the dark current tell us and why is it important?
I note that you called it the ‘dark count’. In my own work we measure a current so I used that word. If one is counting photons, ‘count’ would be better, of course. But to check, could you give me the exact URL where you found the ‘dark count’, so I can check that I’m not just making too many assumptions.

Resourceguy says:
November 7, 2012 at 7:17 pm
Okay if the cycle forecast is done by committee then how are the expert forecasts evaluated and compiled? Is it a central tendency range rule mean and how are the outliers handled?
We all sat around a large table and evaluated by talking about the forecasts presented. Everybody had to convince all the others that the arguments were sound and the forecast good and point out weaknesses and error bounds. Outliers are beaten into the ground :-). At the first meeting we did not reach a unanimous decision so had to announce that the panel was split. At a later meeting [after much more work] we decided to accept the majority opinion. In a sense, you may say that each expert was peer-reviewed by 11 others. This is a much higher level of review than in normal peer-review of a paper for a Journal. We try to agree on a common number, and did not just average all the forecasts under discussion. In spite of all our effort, I think that we agreed on a number that is a bit too high. I raised that issue at our last meeting, but did not found a fertile ground for that opinion, so let the issue slide.

Project722 says:
November 7, 2012 at 7:58 pm
Sure, http://solarimg.org/artis/
From the description of the instrument: http://www.usc.edu/dept/space_science/publications/PDFs/spie6689_21_5.pdf
“The ESP configuration is shown in Figure 1. ESP has a filter wheel in front of the entrance aperture with three redundant Al filters, a visible light (fused silica) filter, and a dark filter. Each thin-film Al filter rejects the visible light while transmitting EUV radiation to the diffraction grating. The fused silica filter may be used to determine the amount of visible light that may reach the EUV channels as a scattered light and its signal should be subtracted from the EUV measurements. The dark filter is to measure each channel’s dark (background) current.”
So my explanation was basically correct, except for this:
“High-energy Solar Energetic Particles (SEP) (more than 40 MeV) can penetrate the ESP housing and opto-mechanical components and deposit some energy in the detectors thus adding particle related signal to the EUV signal. ESP’s dark channel may be used as a proxy for the SEP related signal, which may be subtracted from the EUV channel.”.
The dark current is contaminated by Solar Energetic Particles that leak into the instrument, so the dark count DOES depend on solar activity.

I post this here as a precautionary tale for those seeking patterns in assorted solar, magnetic, and climate-related indexes, searching for matches in timing and possible linkages.
I was playing with the UAH LT data at WoodForTrees. Besides the usual 13-mo (1 yr + 1 mo) smoothing (running centered average), I wanted to see how it looked with longer smoothing periods. Here is 1+1, 5+1, 10+1, and 15+1:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/mean:13/plot/uah/mean:61/plot/uah/mean:121/plot/uah/mean:181
Find the patterns. Identify the points you will match up with other indexes to confirm the timing.
Be careful with noisy data. Question if the sampling rate is high enough to capture the detail you want without distortion.
And be wary as some systems being measured come with built-in smoothing. Your pattern matching attempts may be doomed from the start. Try to smooth your other data to match, and as witnessed with that graph, you may just end up chasing non-existent artifacts.

Ray Tomes says:
November 7, 2012 at 9:14 pm
However I note that long cycles of 208 years and others show up very clearly in solar proxies such as C14 and Be10 as well as in climate.
Longer periods show up intermittently, e.g. http://www.leif.org/research/Production-of-14C.png
The ‘very clearly’ is not so clear.
Is it possible that these changes are not due to TSI but rather to small amounts of high energy events which we do know vary by very large percentages.
The variations in TSI [before 1978] are really determined from cosmic ray proxies, so TSI as such is not the issue. These ‘small amounts of high energy events’ should then also not show up in cosmic ray proxies..
We know that high energy particles affect cloud cover
No, we don’t KNOW that. We know that they produce ionization [which Wilson got the Nobel prize for in 1927], but we don’t know if that is efficient enough to actually produce clouds. Careful modeling suggests that it is not.

vukcevic says:
November 7, 2012 at 11:34 pm
Some propose hypothesis – useful
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.

Just a brief comment as an observer of this discussion. Still being in kindergarten as far as the principles of physics etc. involved in the scientific determination of these matters, I am forced by default to pay close attention to the modes of argument. This is a tip for Dr. Leif S., for what it is worth: You will be much more convincing if you stop being so darned condescending and, all too frequently, insulting towards, those like Vukevic who are practicing methodologies you don’t respect. I think everyone gets the point that you don’t respect them. You don’t need to beat that dead horse. It only produces sympathy for your critics and weakens the ethos of your own arguments. Citing stuff like Dunning-Kruger doesn’t help either. Everyone knows that experts, historically speaking, have very often been wrong.