The data from SWPC is in, and it is lethargic at best. Sunspot numbers took a hit, down to about 42, a delta of ~50 lower compared to the red prediction line.
10.7 cm solar radio flux took a similar hit:
The Ap Geomagnetic index was up slightly, but still anemic….
And the most interesting indicator, the plot of solar polar fields, shows a clear zero line crossing, suggesting that Solar max has been reached:
Solar Polar Fields – Mt. Wilson and Wilcox Combined -1966 to Present
Image from Dr. Leif Svalgaard – Click the pic to view at sourceThough in spite of that, NASA is now suggesting a “double peak”:
Solar Cycle Update: Twin Peaks?
Something unexpected is happening on the sun. 2013 is supposed to be the year of Solar Max, but solar activity is much lower than expected. At least one leading forecaster expects the sun to rebound with a double-peaked maximum later this year.
The quiet has led some observers to wonder if forecasters missed the mark. Solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center has a different explanation:
“This is solar maximum,” he suggests. “But it looks different from what we expected because it is double peaked.”
Conventional wisdom holds that solar activity swings back and forth like a simple pendulum. At one end of the cycle, there is a quiet time with few sunspots and flares. At the other end, Solar Max brings high sunspot numbers and solar storms. It’s a regular rhythm that repeats every 11 years.
Reality, however, is more complicated. Astronomers have been counting sunspots for centuries, and they have seen that the solar cycle is not perfectly regular. For one thing, the back-and-forth swing in sunspot counts can take anywhere from 10 to 13 years to complete; also, the amplitude of the cycle varies. Some solar maxima are very weak, others very strong.
Pesnell notes yet another complication: “The last two solar maxima, around 1989 and 2001, had not one but two peaks.” Solar activity went up, dipped, then resumed, performing a mini-cycle that lasted about two years.
The same thing could be happening now. Sunspot counts jumped in 2011, dipped in 2012, and Pesnell expects them to rebound again in 2013: “I am comfortable in saying that another peak will happen in 2013 and possibly last into 2014,” he predicts.
Another curiosity of the solar cycle is that the sun’s hemispheres do not always peak at the same time. In the current cycle, the south has been lagging behind the north. The second peak, if it occurs, will likely feature the southern hemisphere playing catch-up, with a surge in activity south of the sun’s equator.
Pesnell is a leading member of the NOAA/NASA Solar Cycle Prediction Panel, a blue-ribbon group of solar physicists who assembled in 2006 and 2008 to forecast the next Solar Max. At the time, the sun was experiencing its deepest minimum in nearly a hundred years. Sunspot numbers were pegged near zero and x-ray flare activity flat-lined for months at a time. Recognizing that deep minima are often followed by weak maxima, and pulling together many other threads of predictive evidence, the panel issued this statement:
“The Solar Cycle 24 Prediction Panel has reached a consensus. The panel has decided that the next solar cycle (Cycle 24) will be below average in intensity, with a maximum sunspot number of 90. Given the date of solar minimum and the predicted maximum intensity, solar maximum is now expected to occur in May 2013. Note, this is not a unanimous decision, but a supermajority of the panel did agree.”
Given the tepid state of solar activity in Feb. 2013, a maximum in May now seems unlikely.
“We may be seeing what happens when you predict a single amplitude and the Sun responds with a double peak,” comments Pesnell.
Incidentally, Pesnell notes a similarity between Solar Cycle 24, underway now, and Solar Cycle 14, which had a double-peak during the first decade of the 20th century. If the two cycles are in fact twins, “it would mean one peak in late 2013 and another in 2015.”
No one knows for sure what the sun will do next. It seems likely, though, that the end of 2013 could be a lot livelier than the beginning.
Author: Dr. Tony Phillips |
Barry Cullen says:
March 6, 2013 at 9:20 am
@lsvalgaard; a dynamically stable solar interior just doesn’t make ANY sense, to me.
Then read this attentively: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convection_zone
“The Schwarzschild criterion expresses the conditions under which a region of a star is unstable to convection. A parcel of gas that rises slightly will find itself in an environment of lower pressure than the one it came from. As a result, the parcel will expand and cool. If the rising parcel cools to a lower temperature than its new surroundings, so that it has a higher density than the surrounding gas, then its lack of buoyancy will cause it to sink back to where it came from. However, if the temperature gradient is steep enough (i. e. the temperature changes rapidly with distance from the center of the star), or if the gas has a very high heat capacity (i. e. its temperature changes relatively slowly as it expands) then the rising parcel of gas will remain warmer and less dense than its new surroundings even after expanding and cooling. Its buoyancy will then cause it to continue to rise. The region of the star in which this happens is the convection zone.”
Helioseismology [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helioseismology ] allows us to measure precisely where the bottom of the convection zone is in the Sun namely at (0.713 +- 0.001)R(Sun). This means that thew inner 71% is dynamically stable and does not convect. This is a directly observed reality.
I’d like to know, if a (single, second, third,…) peak has any significance to Earth’s climate or is it likely to be treated as an outlier ?
In reply to Pesnell
Pesnell says:
Pesnell notes yet another complication: “The last two solar maxima, around 1989 and 2001, had not one but two peaks.” Solar activity went up, dipped, then resumed, performing a mini-cycle that lasted about two years. The same thing could be happening now. Sunspot counts jumped in 2011, dipped in 2012, and Pesnell expects them to rebound again in 2013: “I am comfortable in saying that another peak will happen in 2013 and possibly last into 2014,” he predicts.
William:
Pesnell has no physical explanation for the observed abrupt change from solar magnetic cycle 23 to solar magnetic cycle 24 – the solar magnetic cycle prediction “models” are not based on a physical model of the sun – the solar magnetic cycle “prediction” models correlate past solar observations that were followed by a specific solar magnetic cycle behavior, Pesnell’s “prediction” is only valid if solar magnetic cycle 24 is the same as past solar magnetic cycles. Pesnell is likely not aware of cyclic climate change and cyclic abrupt climate change and likely is not aware there is correlation of cosmogenic isotope changes (the cosmogenic isotope changes are known to be caused by solar magnetic cycle changes and geomagnetic field changes) which indicates the sun is somehow causing past climate cycles (gradual type such as the Medieval warm period or the Little Ice Age and past cyclic abrupt climate changes such as the Younger Dryas abrupt climate change event.
The following is an alternative prediction for solar magnetic cycle 24 based on a physical solar model and a physical explanation of what caused past cyclic climate change, past abrupt climate change, and the glacial/interglacial cycle.
There is obviously a physical explanation for the glacial/interglacial cycle. This is a proxy record of how the planet’s climate has cycled for the last 5 million years. The glacial/interglacial cycle is now roughly 100,000 years long with a long glacial period of 85,000 to 90,000 years and a short interglacial period of 10,000 to 12,000 years. The paleorecord indicates interglacial periods end abruptly. There is currently no hypothesis that can physically explain abrupt climate change or the glacial/interglacial cycle. The appeal to a super high amplification factor which would enable a small forcing change such as the amount of solar insolation at N65 to trigger the glacial/interglacial period was made in an attempt to explain what the past record. Current analysis and observation indicates however that the planet resists forcing changes by increasing or decreasing planetary clouds in the tropics, which is negative feedback rather than positive (amplification) feedback.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Five_Myr_Climate_Change.svg
Solar observations indicate solar magnetic cycle 24 is unusual, a special cycle, a prediction of how solar cycle 24 will unfold cannot therefore be based on observations of recent solar magnetic cycles. Solar cycle 24 appears to be the special once in 1450 year or 8000 year solar magnetic cycles that cause (assuming I understand the climate forcing mechanisms and solar magnetic cycle changes causes the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle, the Heinrich cycle, and the glacial/interglacial cycle). The Dansgaard-Oeschger climate cycle has a periodicity 1450 years or 1000 years and the Heinrich climate cycle has a periodicity of 6000 years to 8000 years.
In the later part of the twentieth century the solar magnetic cycle, based on cosmogenic isotope analysis, was at its highest activity level and the longest high activity level in 11,000 years.
http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/nature02995.pdf
Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years
Here we report a reconstruction of the sunspot number covering the past 11,400years, based on dendrochronologically dated radiocarbon concentrations. We combine physics-based models for each of the processes connecting the radiocarbon concentration with sunspot number. According to our reconstruction, the level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional, and the previous period of equally high activity occurred more than 8,000 years ago. We find that during the past 11,400 years the Sun spent only of the order of 10% of the time at a similarly high level of magnetic activity and almost all of the earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episode.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/data3.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/data4.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/data4.html
Last Heinrich Event – Younger Dryas Abrupt Cooling Event
The Younger Dryas is one of the most well-known examples of abrupt change. About 14,500 years ago, the Earth’s climate began to shift from a cold glacial world to a warmer interglacial state. Partway through this transition, temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere suddenly (William: With 70% of the Younger Dryas cooling occurring in a decade. One of the unexplained paleoclimate puzzles is what is physically capable of cooling the earth so rapidly. A massive forcing change is required and a forcing change that over rides the planetary temperature regulating mechanism which is to increase or decrease clouds in tropics is required) returned to near-glacial conditions (Figure 6). This near-glacial period is called the Younger Dryas, named after a flower (Dryas octopetala) that grows in cold conditions and became common in Europe during this time. The end of the Younger Dryas, about 11,500 years ago, was particularly abrupt. In Greenland, temperatures rose 10° C (18° F) in a decade (Figure 6; Cuffey and Clow, 1997).
William: This article hypothesizes that Younger Dryas abrupt climate change has caused by an interruption to the North Atlantic drift current. A series of papers in the last 10 years indicate the cooling due to a complete interruption of the North Atlantic drift current is orders of magnitude too small to explain the Younger Dryas cooling and that the interruption to the North Atlantic drift current occurred a 1000 years before the Younger Dryas cooling event.
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.999,y.0,no.,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090513130942.htm
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~david/Gulf.pdf
As Livingston and Penn noted the magnetic field strength of newly formed sun spots is decaying linearly. The sunspots are formed from magnetic ropes that are formed at the solar tachocline (the tachocline is the thin layer that separates the solar convection zone from the solar radiative zone.) The magnetic field strength of newly formed sunspots can only decay linearly if the magnetic ropes that are formed at the tachocline and rise up to form sunspots are decaying linearly. (The observation that the magnetic field strength of individual sunspots is decaying linearly supports the assertion that sunspots are formed from magnetic ropes that are created at the tachocline.) The magnetic ropes that rise up through the convection zone require a minimum field strength to avoid being torn apart by turbulence in the convection zone. As the magnetic field strength of the magnetic ropes continues to decline the turbulence in the convection zone is tearing the magnetic ropes apart. The solar cycle 24 sunspot groups are observed to made up of many short lived tiny sunspots, which are referred to as spores.
As the solar magnetic cycle was at its highest activity in 11,000 years in the last 70 years and there are D-O cycles and Heinrich event cycles in the paleo record, if the sun caused the past climate cycles and as the solar magnetic field strength of individual sunspots is decaying linearly, assuming the past climate cycles were caused by the sun and the sun is entering the special cycle that cause climate cycles (we have already observed planetary warming, the warming however has stalled which cannot be explained the AGW hypothesis) the following a prediction for solar cycle 24.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sun_poster.svg
If solar magnetic cycle is the special solar cycle that is hypothesized to cause Heinrich events, rather than the solar cycle that causes the D-O cycle which is a Maunder minimum type cycle, the solar magnetic cycle will be terminated and will not be physically capable or restarting via the normal mechanism that creates the magnetic ropes at the tachocline and that are then released to rise up to the surface of the sun. (The magnetic rope mechanism requires the residual solar magnetic fields from past cycle sunspots as a seed to form new powerful magnetic ropes. It appears based on observations solar magnetic cycle 24 sunspots are now too small and do not have sufficient field strength to survive the trip down through the convection zone to the tachocline. The number of sunspots and the lifetime of sunspot groups will continue to decline. The sun will be spotless in roughly 12 months. A spotless sun in the middle of solar magnetic cycle is anomalous as the normal solar magnetic cycle has a gradual rather than an abrupt end.
If solar observations in the next 12 months support the above prediction that solar cycle 24 is the special solar cycle that causes a Heinrich cyclic event rather than the type of solar magnetic cycle that causes a Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle, I can provide more details concerning what to expect next.
Kip Hansen said on March 6, 2013 at 8:58 am:
No. Twin Peaks was Lost before they were able to fully envision and subsequently condense Lost for TV, thus the presentation was Northern Exposure processed through X-Files.
Amazingly, I believe I only ever saw a few episodes, although in that ancient age you could keep track of many different shows by simply reading summaries and descriptions in the TV Guide.
This completes the Search Engine Seeding (SES) section, whereby enough terms have been dropped that searchers for “Twin Peaks” info might be directed to this page on this site, in the hopes they might sufficiently be exposed to enough real factual science that learning might possibly occur without warning.
William Astley says:
March 6, 2013 at 10:09 am
the solar magnetic cycle prediction “models” are not based on a physical model of the sun
This displays your ignorance, see e.g. http://www.leif.org/EOS/Choudhuri-forecast.pdf
The rest of your comment is [mostly wrong] speculation.
[I] As a result, the parcel will expand and cool. If the rising parcel cools to a lower temperature than its new surroundings, so that it has a higher density than the surrounding gas, then its lack of buoyancy will cause it to sink back to where it came from.[/i]
The sun sounds like a giant lava lamp. Groovy.
TheHermit says:
March 6, 2013 at 10:33 am
“…then its lack of buoyancy will cause it to sink back to where it came from.”
The sun sounds like a giant lava lamp. Groovy.
Actually, what it means is that the interior does not convect at all. The outer 29% does, that is where it looks like a lava lamp.
William Astley says:
March 6, 2013 at 10:09 am
As the solar magnetic cycle was at its highest activity in 11,000 years in the last 70 years
That is an oft repeated myth, but is actually not true: http://www.leif.org/research/The%20long-term%20variation%20of%20solar%20activity.pdf
Given the tepid state of solar activity in Feb. 2013, a maximum in May now seems unlikely.
That comment is ambiguous. How have they ruled out the possibility that the peak has already occurred or (with small fluctuations) is occurring now?
I live in Chicago and noticed that big snow storms here have mostly cycles of 11+-1 years: http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2011/01/31/the-10-worst-snowstorms-in-chicago/
They seem to occur 2-4 years after a solar activity through : 1916 (through) – 1918 snow storm, 1925/1929, 1935/1939, 1965/1967, 1976/1979,1997/199, 2009/2011
Of course this is just an observation of a regular guy, not a scientific one.
lsvalgaard: Solar cycle 14 had many peaks as will cycle 24.
What counts as a “peak”; the smooth line (more representative of the underlying process?) for cycle 14 had only one peak, approximately a long “plateau” with a large standard deviation in the deviations from the smooth.
re: younger dryas. I still favor the idea that a large meteor/asteroid fragment struck the ice sheet, triggering the northern hemisphere temperature drop. If it was big enough, it would have gone a long ways towards driving the north american megafauna towards extinction as well.
Press coverage of the NASA statement on this make it sound like the twin peak is already here for forming in progress and the word IF is avoided by the wordsmiths. At least they are exposed now.
lsvalgaard: Hathaway’s forecast is a description of what the cycle looks like until now combined with a fit to a the average solar cycle and so by definition will change continuously with time, just like the weather forecast will. I’m sure you would prefer a weather forecast based on the latest observations and updated in real time. Or are one of those people that rely on the Farmers’ Almanac?
Hathaway’s predictions are good “one step ahead” predictions, possibly better than simple extrapolation of empirical model fits. They have been shown to be poor predictors of 3 years ahead. If for some reason you are interested in, say, 8 years from now, you would ignore his models. There might not be any models of solar variability that you would want to cite in support of, say, a plan or public policy, for 8 years from now, but Hathaway’s models would certainly be in the group to which you would give little weight.
3) As hydrogen is used at the core surface, it must be replaced for new fusion to occur. The replacement process takes about 50 years and is needed every 360 years.
4) The 11 year Sunspot cycle that we see is the movement of the latitude plasma loops over the core surface. We see the core fusion action via interlocked magnetic fields transmitted by plasma currents.
5) The diameter of the Sun should increase every 360 years then decrease for 50 years. More heat/internal pressure, then less heat/internal pressure. Note: since the fusion does not occur in the center of the core, it does not take 100,000 years for the photons to “escape”; they are driven via interaction with the plasma loops.
I’m far from an expert on the Sun, although I do read what I can to learn. I would have to ask you to defend 3) — why and how would hydrogen need to be replaced “every 360 years”? Are you asserting that the environment there is somehow static for 360 years (while hydrogen is burned) and then suddenly changes to dynamic while new hydrogen is cycled in by some process? What process? Why wouldn’t there be a continuous dynamic diffusion of hydrogen and helium in and out, given the enormous temperatures involved?
Then, what does 4) even mean? We see “core fusion action” via interlocked magnetic fields transmitted by plasma currents?
Finally, we have been observing the sun with pretty good instrumentation for at least 150 years, if not longer. We’ve had telescopes for all of the 410 years you claim for a major breathing mode oscillation of solar diameter. You claim that there is some sort of continuous consumption and nearly instantaneous equilibration without any sort of diffusive latency in 4 and 5, so one would think that we would be able to directly observe the proposed modulation of solar diameter as it happens in real-time with modern instrumentation. Is there the slightest bit of evidence that any such thing happens? Is there any e.g. modulation of neutrino flux suggesting a variable burn rate in the solar core?
I do not know the answers to these questions for certain (although I would guess that Lief does), but I think that at solar core temperatures it would be very difficult to significantly disequilibrate any diffusive process. I think that the photon mean free path inside a plasma at solar densities is pretty straightforward to compute, and with known boundary conditions at the core and surface, it seems as though it would be a difficult to get the diffusion as wrong as you claim that it is gotten. Without enough photon density it rather seems as though the sun’s outer part would rapidly collapse, as the photons are in large part what prevents it from doing so, if my limited understanding is correct (and the outer photosphere where they escape is in fact the place where it does “collapse” in the sense that one can no longer maintain a plasma and the surface forms). Finally, I don’t recall reading about any observations supporting a 410 year breathing mode modulation of solar diameter. Do you have any references?
rgb
I like to check out the view of the Sun a few times a week on spaceweather.com. I noticed a somewhat large increase of sunspot activity about a month ago around the time the sun’s pols were shifting and sunspots migrating toward the equator. I notice sunspots migrating away from the equator currently. Just personal observations.
Matthew R Marler says:
March 6, 2013 at 11:42 am
What counts as a “peak”; the smooth line (more representative of the underlying process?) for cycle 14 had only one peak, approximately a long “plateau” with a large standard deviation in the deviations from the smooth.
Ask Pesnell about this 🙂 More seriously, if one plots the activity separately for each hemisphere for cycle 14 http://www.leif.org/N-S-Asymm-SC14-month-Groups.png is is clear that the Northern Hemisphere [blue] peaks two years before the South [red], so in that sense you might talk about ‘two peaks’ although Pesnell did not do that. Here is more on such asymmetries: http://www.leif.org/research/ApJ88587.pdf
Matthew R Marler says:
March 6, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Hathaway’s predictions are good “one step ahead” predictions, possibly better than simple extrapolation of empirical model fits.
And that is what they meant for.
plan or public policy, for 8 years from now, but Hathaway’s models would certainly be in the group to which you would give little weight.
NASA policy [e.g. on whether to de-orbit the Hubble Space Telescope] is not based on Hathaway’s models, but on mine [and Schatten’s – really the same]. On the other hand once maximum is past and we are say 3 years before minimum, the polar field precursor will predict with some accuracy the size of the next cycle some 8 years in the future.
Need correct URL: More seriously, if one plots the activity separately for each hemisphere for cycle 14 http://www.leif.org/research/N-S-Asymm-SC14-month-Groups.png
Geoff says:
March 6, 2013 at 9:07 am
NASA seems to be basing their predictions on what “they hope” solar activity will be, as compared to “what solar activity levels are expected”. NASA has become a political organization.
Why would NASA “hope” for a particular level of solar activity?
In reply to:
lsvalgaard says:
March 6, 2013 at 10:32 am
William Astley says:
March 6, 2013 at 10:09 am
the solar magnetic cycle prediction “models” are not based on a physical model of the sun
This displays your ignorance, see e.g. http://www.leif.org/EOS/Choudhuri-forecast.pdf
The rest of your comment is [mostly wrong] speculation.
William Astley says:
March 6, 2013 at 10:09 am
As the solar magnetic cycle was at its highest activity in 11,000 years in the last 70 years
That is an oft repeated myth, but is actually not true: http://www.leif.org/research/The%20long-term%20variation%20of%20solar%20activity.pdf
William, Hello:
1) Pesnell’s prediction of a twin peak in solar activity prediction is based on what? A physical solar model? What is the physical explanation for the observed linear decline of magnetic field strength of newly formed sunspots? What is the physical explanation for the observed cycle 24 small and short lived sunspots? Your link to sunspot cycle predictions appears to have nothing to do with explaining the difference in solar cycle 24 and other cycles. Is there any discussion of why solar cycle 24 is different from other solar magnetic cycles among specialists?
2) You have copied your work on historic sunspot counts a couple of times, in response to my quoting of Usoskin’s paper that asserts that solar magnetic cycle activity in the later half of the 20th century was the highest in 11,000 years. I do not see how your work on historic sunspot count invalidates Usoskin’s Nature published paper that used cosmogenic isotope analysis to support his assertion. The issue is past and recent solar heliosphere changes, not sunspot counts. The assertion that the sun was at its highest activity level and the longest time at high activity in 11,000 years explains the late 20th century warming and will explain the cooling, if there is cooling caused by the solar cycle 24 slowdown or interruption.
3) I am predicting either: 1) a solar cycle slowdown which is not controversial as a cycle slowdown is now the consensus prediction and planetary cooling which some believe is controversial or 2) an interruption to the solar magnetic cycle and planetary cooling. Based on recent observations it appears the interruption to the solar magnetic cycle is most likely. The Dansgaard-Oeschger climate cycle, the Heinrich climate cycle, and the glacial/interglacial climate cycle happened for physical reasons. There are cosmogenic isotope changes at each of these events which indicates the sun is causing what is observed. There is a set of solar system observations, geomagnetic observations, and astrophysical observations to support the “speculative” and “wrong” solar model that I am proposing, however, I do not want to distract the conversation from solar cycle affects on planetary temperature unless there is unequivocal observational evidence that the solar magnetic cycle has been interrupted.
If there is planetary cooling, I will join the conversation in this forum to discuss how solar magnetic cycle changes cause planetary warming and cooling.
If there is unequivocal observational evidence that the solar magnetic cycle has been interrupted, then understanding how that is possible and what to expect next is no longer an academic problem and I will return to the forum with papers and observations to support strawman hypothesized mechanisms to explain how the solar magnetic cycle can be interrupted.
http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/nature02995.pdf
Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years
Here we report a reconstruction of the sunspot number covering the past 11,400 years, based on dendrochronologically dated radiocarbon concentrations. We combine physics-based models for each of the processes connecting the radiocarbon concentration with sunspot number. According to our reconstruction, the level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional, and the previous period of equally high activity occurred more than 8,000 years ago. We find that during the past 11,400 years the Sun spent only of the order of 10% of the time at a similarly high level of magnetic activity and almost all of the earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episode.
lsvalgaard says:
March 6, 2013 at 4:56 am
“How many peaks did cycle 14 have”
Leif, all of the 11 year cycles have two peaks in my opinion, it’s just that they are not noticeable in some cycles when they are in phase together, The first peak occurs when the magnetic field winds up and after the polarity reverses the second peak occurs when the magnetic field winds down.
The timing, amplitude and phase of magnetic fields are governed by well known laws. The size, strength and duration of magnetic fields and cycles observed on the sun have no different properties than that of other observable magnetic fields.
It could be this.
It could be that.
It could be something else.
Or it could be none of the above . . . . . . .
Ah – my memory of playing me up now I’m in my seventh decade: – “The Science IS settled” !
OK, they are MY capitals.
[And ‘Sarc’ – did you guess?]
Browsing back in history a the smoothed curves primarily (which is something of a crapshoot based on how the smoothing was applied)shows quite a few with double or “prolonged” peaks (e.g., Cycle 16, peak ran from about 1927 to 1929, peaking at about 75–same as today), but I’ve seen none thus far that have a 2nd peak higher than the 1st. I see nothing in the history of Solar Cycles to suggest a basis for such a suggestion (higher 2nd). (http://www.ips.gov.au/Educational/2/3/1)
If we want to toss around ideas of “possibilities” then we could also theorize that we could have a series of 20 peaks in the current cycle, or that it will actually run about 22 years. Just because it’s not happened in recorded history (back to 1750) doesn’t mean it COULD NOT BE “possible,” maybe. But certainly very unlikely. Also, many of those with double peaks appear to be coincident with very low sunspot numbers…
In the end, we have a solar theory and limited observations. What will be will be and hopefully, someone will come up with an advancement in the theory that will help with future predictions. In the meantime, I believe we will finally have observations that can possibly help define the overall solar influence on the Earth’s climate and climate variability.
Leif Svalgaard, thank you for your replies.