Despite some small upticks on sunspot and 10.7cm radio activity, the magentic activity of the sun is still bumping along the bottom.
A slight uptick was seen in sunspot count.
A similar slight uptick occurred in radio flux.
Note how the Ap magnetic index remains low, down 4 units from last month:
Oddly, there seems to be a slight drop in total solar irradiance. It may just be temporary, or an indication that we have passed solar max:
Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) – Daily Average Most Recent 3 Month Plot
SOURCE Solar Radiation & Climate Experiment – click the pic to view at sourceTotal Solar Irradiance (TSI) – Daily Average Full SORCE Mission- 2003 – Present
SOURCE Solar Radiation & Climate Experiment – click the pic to view at sourceMore at the WUWT Solar reference page.Solar scientist David Hathaway has updated his prediction page on 5/1/13:
The current prediction for Sunspot Cycle 24 gives a smoothed sunspot number maximum of about 66 in the Fall of 2013. The smoothed sunspot number has already reached 67 (in February 2012) due to the strong peak in late 2011 so the official maximum will be at least this high and this late. We are currently over four years into Cycle 24. The current predicted and observed size makes this the smallest sunspot cycle since Cycle 14 which had a maximum of 64.2 in February of 1906.
geran says:
May 7, 2013 at 5:05 pm
The point that we are reasonably well, but are too accepting of corruption and perversion, yet few recognize this.
Speak for yourself.
Has the predict line changed over the past 3 years or so? If so, I’d like to see that.
jbird says:
May 7, 2013 at 5:13 pm
Has the predict line changed over the past 3 years or so? If so, I’d like to see that.
The prediction of maximum was for 75 [later revised to 72]. That has not changed. Once well within the cycle, the predicted shape is well-determined. Hathaway’s is a good fit to the observations and will, of course, change slightly over time.
Does a pore count as sunspot?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/solar/
Any comment concerning the tiny pin prick sunspots?
The idiotic hiding of the solar magnetic cycle interruption would be humorous, if there were no climate consequences. Unfortunately it appears we are going to experience a solar magnetic cycle interruption which causes the cooling phase of a Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle or a Heinrich event.
I am truly curious how the media will respond to global cooling.
As the magnetic field strength of newly formed sunspots decays linearly (See link to Livingston & Penn’s paper below. Seems innocuous does it? Why would an interruption to the solar magnetic cycle make any difference to us?), the magnetic ropes that rise up from the solar tachocline (tachocline is name for the thin region that separates the solar convection zone and the solar radiative zone) through the convection zone, are being torn apart by turbulence in the convection zone.
What is left are tiny sunspots which the specialists call ‘pores’.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.0784v1
Long-term Evolution of Sunspot Magnetic Fields
Independent of the normal solar cycle, a decrease in the sunspot magnetic field
strength has been observed using the Zeeman-split 1564.8nm Fe I spectral line at the
NSO Kitt Peak McMath-Pierce telescope… ….This trend was seen to continue in observations of the first sunspots of the new solar Cycle 24, and extrapolating a linear fit to this trend would lead to only half the number of spots in Cycle 24 compared to Cycle 23, and imply virtually no sunspots in Cycle 25.
There are hundreds of individual published papers that layout the theory (there is cyclic climate change in the paleo record and each and every time the climate changes there is an accompanying change to the solar magnetic cycle) and the mechanisms (by which solar magnetic cycle changes modulate planetary climate), however, there is a very vocal group that are stating catastrophic warming at a volume and consistency that drowns out or intimidates anyone connecting the dots to predict global cooling.
The paleoclimatic record shows cycles of warming followed by cooling Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles and the more sever Heinrich events. The D-O cycles have a periodicity of 1450 years plus or minus a discrete change of 500 years (i.e. 950 years, 1450 years, and 1950 years). Roughly every 8000 years to 10,000 years there is a very, very strong D-O cycle which is called a Heinrich event. This is Greenland ice temperature, last 11,000 years determined from ice core analysis, from Richard Alley’s paper. You can see the D-O cycles in this data.The late Gerald Bond has able to track 23 of the D-O cycles/Heinrich events through the current interglacial and into the last glacial phase.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
http://rivernet.ncsu.edu/courselocker/PaleoClimate/Bond%20et%20al.,%201997%20Millenial%20Scale%20Holocene%20Change.pdf
A Pervasive Millennial-Scale Cycle in North Atlantic Holocene and Glacial Climates
http://rivernet.ncsu.edu/courselocker/PaleoClimate/Bond%20et%20al%201999%20%20N.%20Atlantic%201-2.PDF
http://www.climate4you.com/
This paper provides the observational evidence to support the assertion that the last Heinrich event 12,900 years before present at which time the planet went from interglacial warm to glacial cold when insolation at latitude N65 in June and July was at maximum with 90% of the cooling occurring in less than a decade correlates with an unknown massive change in C14 which correlates with a solar magnetic cycle change.
Reduced solar activity as a trigger for the start of the Younger Dryas? (William: The Younger Dryas is a Heinrich Event. The mechanism that causes a Heinrich event is an interruption to the solar magnetic cycle not a reduction in total solar irradiation. The re-start of the solar magnetic cycle causes a geomagnetic excursion. There are burn marks on the surface of the earth that correlate in time with the geomagnetic excursions and the Heinrich events.)
http://www.falw.vu/~renh/pdf/Renssen-etal-QI-2000.pdf
The following is more information concerning how unusual the 20th century period of high solar activity was and what to possibly expect if the sun moves abruptly into a deep minimum.
Curiously there are geomagnetic excursions that coincide in time with the abrupt climate change Heinrich events. There are also geomagnetic excursions that correlate with the termination of past interglacial periods.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/003358947790031X
The Gothenburg Magnetic Excursion
The Gothenburg Magnetic Excursion in a broad sense ranges from 13,750 to 12,350 years BP (William: This is weird. The Gothenburg Magnetic excursion occurred at the same time as Younger Dryas Heinrich event.) and ends with the Gothenburg Magnetic Flip at 12,400−12,350 years BP (= the Fjärås Stadial in southern Scandinavia) with an equatorial VGP position in the central Pacific. The Gothenburg Magnetic Flip is recorded in five closely dated and mutually correlated cores in Sweden. In all five cores, the inclination is completely reversed in the layer representing the Fjärås Stadial dated at 12,400−12,350 years BP. The cores were taken 160 km apart and represent both marine and lacustrine environments. The Gothenburg Magnetic Flip represents the shortest excursion and the most rapid polar change known at present. It is also hitherto the far best-dated paleomagnetic event. The Gothenburg Magnetic Excursion and Flip are proposed as a standard magnetostatigraphic unit.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0706.0385
Grand minima and maxima of solar activity: New observational constraints I.G. Usoskin, S.K. Solanki, and G.A. Kovaltsov
…We present an updated reconstruction of sunspot number over multiple millennia, from 14C data by means of a physics-based model, using an updated model of the evolution of the solar open magnetic flux. A list of grand minima and maxima of solar activity is presented for the Holocene (since 9500 BC) and the statistics of both the length of individual events as well as the waiting time between them are analyzed….
…Solar activity on multi-millenial time scales has been recently reconstructed using a physics-based model from measurements of 14C in tree rings (see full details in
Solanki et al. 2004, Usoskin et al. 2006a). The validity of the model results for the last centennia has been proven by independent data on measurements of 44Ti in stony meteorites (Usoskin et al. 2006b). The reconstruction depends on the knowledge of temporal changes of the geomagnetic dipole field, which must be estimated independently by paleomagnetic methods. Here we compare two solar activity reconstructions, which … …the more recent work of Korte & Constable (2005) may underestimate it. Thus we consider both models as they bound a realistic case. We note that the Yang et al. (2000) data run more than 4000 years longer and give a more conservative estimate of the grand maxima.
See figure 3 in this paper. It shows that solar activity in 20th century particularly in the last half of the 20th century was the highest in 12,000 years and more importantly the duration of the high period was the longest in 12,000 years.
http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/nature02995.pdf
Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years by S. K. Solanki, I. G. Usoskin, B. Kromer, M. Schussler & J. Beer
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…
The cyclic abrupt climate change in the paleo climatic record were caused by an interruption to the solar magnetic cycle.
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html
Sudden climate transitions during the Quaternary
According to the marine records, the Eemian interglacial ended with a rapid cooling event about 110,000 years ago (e.g., Imbrie et al., 1984; Martinson et al., 1987), which also shows up in ice cores and pollen records from across Eurasia. From a relatively high resolution core in the North Atlantic. Adkins et al. (1997) suggested that the final cooling event took less than 400 years, and it might have been much more rapid… …The event at 8200 ka is the most striking sudden cooling event during the Holocene, giving widespread cool, dry conditions lasting perhaps 200 years before a rapid return to climates warmer and generally moister than the present. This event is clearly detectable in the Greenland ice cores, where the cooling seems to have been about half-way as severe as the Younger Dryas-to-Holocene difference (Alley et al., 1997; Mayewski et al., 1997). No detailed assessment of the speed of change involved seems to have been made within the literature (though it should be possible to make such assessments from the ice core record), but the short duration of these events at least suggests changes that took only a few decades or less to occur.
geran,
Do not push too harder. No body can predict Sun’s behavior accurately—no matter whom admit it or not.
sorry, but your own comments speak for ya….
1) they don’t keep it from anyone
2) it is not hard to contemplate the different views that we get at different wavelengths
3) the all vary closely as the sunspot number: you predict one, you predict them all
4) since you are here to learn it is time that you start learning
Juvenile? 0nly in your fantasies….
If there is a little more activity at one area of the sun’s surface than on the rest then allowing for Earth’s orbit that would translate to it facing Earth roughly every 28 days assuming that activity is reasonably close to the equator (if it was right on the equator it would be 27 days). This roughly 28 day cycle activity peak occurred at the beginning and end of April so the sunspot count is a little higher that month. It should also be quite high this month as we have got the end of the peak in the first week of May and there should be a new peak later in the month. (Remember April has 30 days).
I have been interested in the sun’s absolute magnetic strength. So I use data from the Wilcox Solar Observatory and record the monthly mean average strength from the daily mean average figures (negatives are converted to positives for this exercise). For the first 51 months of cycle 24 compared to the first 51 months of the previous 3 cycles the average strength is 66% of cycle 23, 69% of cycle 22 and 55% of cycle 21. I haven’t adjusted these figures for cycle length because I am not sure that such an adjustment is relevant.
Incidentally I have used a similar technique with SOHO EUV data and get these emissions in cycle 23 to be 61% of cycle 23 and with the use of F10.7 cm flux data as a proxy but adjusted to cycle 23/24 data I get EUV emissions in cycle 24 so far to be around 40% for the same period of cycle 22.
Has anyone looked at this – perhaps using more sophisticated methodology?
Peter Pan says:
May 7, 2013 at 5:55 pm
geran,
Do not push too harder. No body can predict Sun’s behavior accurately—no matter whom admit it or not.
>>>>>>>>
Wow, Peter, I think you really said it all.
Now if we can make any sense out of what you said….
I enjoy all of the comments here. It has forced me to to improve my mathematical abilities just to keep up with the arguments. Mathematics was never my strong suite, but the issues presented here have forced me to study the things I should have learned long ago!
William Astley says:
May 7, 2013 at 5:39 pm
solar activity in 20th century particularly in the last half of the 20th century was the highest in 12,000 years
Actually, that is not the case as I have pointed out to you a number of times already.
@Leif Svalgard 1:00 pm
[Sigh]. When we are well into the cycle the past part of the cycle is a good predictor of the rest of the cycle, so Hathaway does the right thing: continuously updating the prediction, based on the latest data.
Indeed Hathaway does the right thing by updating the prediction (or is it projection?).
What geran and others object to is Hathaway’s erasing of his prior predictions. Most of us are adults and are capable of tracking more than one series at a time.
It would be a far better to add to the plot to the past predictions made at Jan-10, Jul-10, Jan-11, Jul-11, Jan-12, Jul-12, Jan-13, in dashed lines grading in weight or in color from blue to red.
Stephen Rasey says:
May 7, 2013 at 7:25 pm
Indeed Hathaway does the right thing by updating the prediction (or is it projection?).
What geran and others object to is Hathaway’s erasing of his prior predictions.
Nobody is keeping track of old weather predictions [except the forecasters themselves in order to improve them] and it is similarly not interesting to keep track of last years solar predictions.
Geran
Are you a member of the tabanidae?
William Astley says:
May 7, 2013 at 5:39 pm
Our current understanding of the Interstellar Background (the local bubble in which is the local cloud LIC)
is not homogenous throughout as was once thought.
Mini clouds and cloudettes exist that we are now capable of seeing downwind of the solar system. As we look back we are now cognizant of the fact that some of these cloudettes will be a adversely affected by our solar system traversing it making them harder to see if broken apart into even smaller structures. ( a minor interrupt)
You want a solar interrupt wrap the solar system in a cold heavy H blanket and alter the solar winds escape pattern at its new boundary.
Thanks Dr. S. for: Recent results from the Planck mission http://arxiv.org/pdf/1303.5076.pdf Timely too, WPR covered this, then I discovered you had as well on your webpage.
Wondering if you noticed this from the Vuks,
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SSN-LOD.htm ?
Back from dinner and found this:
“Nobody is keeping track of old weather predictions [except the forecasters themselves in order to improve them] and it is similarly not interesting to keep track of last years solar predictions.”
Throwing the truth out will make you an “intellectual”….
(They actually believe this.)
Here is a link to a similar plot via the webarchive from 9-Feb-2011.
http://web.archive.org/web/20110212002303im_/http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/sunspot.gif
Actually, this curve is little different. Predicted values:
Jan-2011 = 50
Jul-2011 = 64 +/- 1
Jan-2012 = 77
Jul-2012 = 85
Jan-2013 = 88 +/- 1, max 89-90 in Mar-Apr
Jul-2013 = 88 +/- 1
Jan-2014 = 82
Jan-2015 = 70
Jan-2016 = 50
Jan-2017 = 32
The red line from from the April 2013 plot in the header appear to have the very same values as July-2013 to Jan-2019. I don’t see evidence that the curve is updated in the slightest except to erase that portion of the curve that is history.
@lsvalgaard 7:29 pm
Nobody is keeping track of old weather predictions [except the forecasters themselves in order to improve them]
Translation: Nobody does except the people who do.
and it is similarly not interesting to keep track of last years solar predictions.
Translation: similarly, those interested in improving predictions/projections are very interested in last years predictions/projections. (Maybe even more interested than the person MAKING the projection.)
“What is this 28-day cycle you speak of?”
Technically speaking, this is known as the Sun’s Period.
(running away…)
Leif said:
“Nobody is keeping track of old weather predictions [except the forecasters themselves in order to improve them] and it is similarly not interesting to keep track of last years solar predictions.”
If solar predictions are comparable to weather predictions they are not true predictions at all.
In weather forecasting the outturn is always different in one way or another (sometimes obviously but often subtly) to all prediction attempts that came before.
It is that persistent unreliability that causes earlier predictions to be valueless such that they are erased.
Solar ‘predictions’ are similarly valueless otherwise they would not be erased as they go along. They are just experimental guesses issued in the hope of making progress rather than in the expectation of success.
So I think Leif overstates the case for such guesses having a sufficient level of reliability to be taken as useful predictions.
“geran” says May 7, 2013 at 7:50 pm …
– gag –
Clean up needed on this thread …
In reply to
lsvalgaard says:
May 7, 2013 at 7:16 pm
William Astley says:
May 7, 2013 at 5:39 pm
solar activity in 20th century particularly in the last half of the 20th century was the highest in 12,000 years
Actually, that is not the case as I have pointed out to you a number of times already.
Your comment is not correct. Solar activity in the 20th century particularly in the last half of the 20th century was the highest in 8000 years. That statement is made based on the analysis of cosmogenic isotopes in multiple papers for which I provided links to. Also I believe I understand what causes the D-O cycle and the Heinrich events. Let’s agree to differ. As noted below new observations will determine which assertion is correct.
You did not respond to the observation that sunspots are turning into pores. The next stage is no sunspots. Any comments concerning what will happen to the sun in the next couple of years?
You have stated that the 20th century warming has not caused by solar magnetic cycle changes.
I find that ironic, as we are about to experience the cooling phase of either a Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle or the more sever Heinrich event. Based on the observations I believe a Heinrich event is more likely.
I have stated and provided multi links to papers that explain the mechanisms that the majority of the 20th century warming was caused by solar magnetic cycle changes.
Observations will determine who is correct.
My comments concerning the sun (I have stated that the solar magnetic cycle has been interrupted) will be proven to be correct when there is a NASA announcement that the sun is anomalously spotless.
My comments concerning planetary cooling will be proven correct when there are CNN and PBS specials to discuss global cooling.
We experienced the warming phase of a Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle in the later part of the 20th century. D-O cycles are caused by solar magnetic cycle changes. The 20th century warming has primarily caused by changes to planetary cloud cover (both low level and high level clouds), not by increases in atmospheric CO2.
Easterbrook’s presentation to the US senate committee on Energy, Environment and telecommunications provides data and logic to support that assertion the 20th century warming was not caused by increases in atmospheric CO2.
http://www.tvw.org/index.php?option=com_tvwplayer&eventID=2013030153#start=627&stop=5945
Did you notice that Europe experienced the coldest March in 100 years. Record snowfall and expectionally cold in Europe this winter. Record cold and record snowfall in Alaska. Record snowfall in the US. Increased snowfall on glaciers. Record sea ice in Antarctic.
The above seems to be what one would expect if the planet was about to cool. Certainly there is no sign of warming.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_Apr_2013_v5.5.png
lsvalgaard says:
May 7, 2013 at 2:27 pm
The double peak is not fiction when, e.g., the first peak is the northern hemisphere cycle max and the second peak is the southern hemisphere cycle max.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.1081.pdf (particularly fig. 10)
http://www.aip.de/groups/MHD/publications/preprints/solcycle.pdf
lsvalgaard says:May 7, 2013 at 4:30 pm
http://www.leif.org/research/WSO-Polar-Fields-since-2003.png
If you would indulge a question, does this chart describe solar magnetic poles with respect to longitude, that are disjunct from the axial/rotational poles? or is this strictly a depiction of the strength of the magnetic fields? Perhaps you could steer me to some explanatory reading material.
If I didn’t know better (which I don’t) I would say that it appears to resemble alternating current with a cycle frequency of 1 year. (What would that be in hertz?)
Pretty interesting, from 1907 till approx 1914 was a cool local minima (plateau not so unlike our current warm local/ global maxima?). The local minima actually started earlier than 1907 but are we headed for a removal of past century warming?
Group of enthusiasts has purchased old Tesla’s labs in New York.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardenclyffe_Tower