“AZleader” writes at “Inform the pundits”.
Austin, August 16, 2014 – A rare spotless day on the sun on July 17-18, 2014 triggered public speculation that an already stunted Cycle 24 was nearly over. Such is not the case. Defying the odds for so late in a sunspot cycle, another solar sunspot maximum was set last month. Another one is coming this month.
In other major news, a long needed revision to the 400-year sunspot record was proposed. It’ll be the first change made to the sunspot record since it was first established by Rudolf Wolf back in 1849. The changes will affect long-term climate and other dependent scientific studies.
One effect of the proposal will be to reduce modern sunspot totals. That will wipe out the so-called “Modern Maximum” and make the current sunspot cycle, Cycle 24, the weakest in 200 years.
Cycle 24 solar sunspot progression
After four straight months of steep declines in monthly sunspot counts, July reversed the trend and increased slightly.
The Royal Observatory of Belgium released July’s average monthly sunspot count on August 1, 2014. Despite the mid-month spotless day, the sunspot number increased and it grew solar maximum again for the sixth straight month.
…
Extended periods of inactivity – like the Spörer, Maunder and Dalton minimums – were all accompanied by cooler earth temperatures. Conditions today mimic Cycles 3, 4 and 5 which marked the beginning of the Dalton Minimum.
Revising the 400-year sunspot record
The 400-year sunspot record is the longest continuously recorded daily measurement made in science. It’s used in many scientific disciplines, including climate science studies. It hasn’t been adjusted since Rudolf Wolf created it over 160 years ago.
Over the centuries errors have crept into the record, degrading its value for long-term studies. New data and discoveries now allow scientists to detect and correct errors. The first serious look back at the long-term record since Wolf in 1849 came without even a press release last month. It’s a modestly titled new paper called “Revising the Sunspot Number” by Frédéric Clette, et al., submitted for publication to the journal Solar and Stellar Astrophysics on July 11, 2014.
Some outcomes of the new paper include:
- The so-called “Modern Maximum” disappears
- Sunspot activity is steady over the last 250 years
- Three detected “inhomogeneities” since 1880 are corrected
- Cycle 24 will become the weakest in 200 years
The new paper describes the current state of understanding of the long term record. It isn’t a complete revision of the entire record, but a first level recalibration going back to 1749. The Royal Observatory of Belgium plans to release this and other revisions incrementally over time.
Solar physicist, Dr. Leif Svalgaard of Stanford University, organized a series of four workshops beginning in 2011 designed to review and revise the long term record. This new paper is the first fruit of that labor. Primarily, it removes “inhomogeneities” and brings the International Sunspot Number and newer Group Count record and solar magnetic history in sync.
Full story here: http://informthepundits.wordpress.com/2014/08/17/sunspots-2014-two-big-surprises/
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
George, I’m aware of the physics. Just didn’t want to use the space to focus the discussion on it. But since you brought it up in detail, I like this description (see link) because it uses the concept of “work” in the process of breaking through the surface film of molecules. It takes more work to break through that film than it does to move through the water once submerged in it.
Now just imagine the amount of work needed to push wind and water around. Or the amount of work it takes to build a cloud.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=5&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CEsQFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cns.gatech.edu%2F~predrag%2Fcourses%2FPHYS-4421-10%2FLautrup%2Fsurface.pdf&ei=7MX2U7agL-jNiwKC8YCYAg&usg=AFQjCNHRI5xwhTCf2fn7Bf7IEi19W9Yiwg&sig2=h7jyDdLRA0NAu7_hs3DMHQ&bvm=bv.73373277,d.cGE
@ur momisugly sturgishooper on August 21, 2014 at 4:06 pm:
You want to splice on UAH, which is global, to a graph showing the MWA. For showing the MWA was global, your response is claiming the MWA was global, and spouting off some garbled regional Central England numbers.
@ur momisugly sturgishooper on August 21, 2014 at 4:07 pm:
What is this convoluted crud? I had to hack the real URL out of it:
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/stgeorge/geog5426/Lamb%20Palaeogeography%20Palaeoclimatology%20Palaeoecology%201965.pdf
THAT is it, an old table from 1965?
Dear Lord, how incompetent must one be to spew a direct copy-paste without even trying to un-garble the text? You scrambled the entire header section without blinking!
You couldn’t even be bothered to take out the carriage returns of the footer. That’s dirt simple, would take a minute. Why should anyone take you seriously and not just scroll past that garbage?
Have you ever actually compared that IPCC graph to the HH Lamb text? I noted the differences with Fig.3. And wrote a section on it. Then I went Top toolbar, Reference Pages: Global Temperature – Climate: Paleoclimate. There’s the graph and a link to where it was examined at Climate Audit. After review I’ll defer to McIntyre’s analysis.
And you are using regional numbers to try to prove the MWA was global, from only one tiny region. Why?
From sturgishooper on August 21, 2014 at 4:25 pm:
Why do you make it so easy for them? CO2 Science has done great work assembling the evidence, from their “Search By Topic” feature you can find many articles and papers on the Medieval Warm Period, regional and global. Why only use them for two regional pieces?
And at the start you did a misrepresenting, foisting off as “MWP in the Southern Hemisphere” a paper on Northern Chile.
If you want them to stop talking about the regional Medieval Warm Anomaly and refer to the global Medieval Warm Period instead, then stop referring to regional examples and go straight to the global evidence.
Points to note: (i) No LIA (ii) Warm Period ends about 1150 so doesn’t coincide with Lamb MW Epoch.
Which includes “Perhaps the most outstanding feature of this history was the warm period it revealed between 860 and 1000 AD”.
Again this contradicts the Lamb reconstruction. According to Lamb temperatures in 800-1000 were about the same as those in 1700-1900 (see your earlier comment). So either Lamb is wrong or the MWP did not take place at the same time around the world.
Leif, I didn’t go beyond the range of your new GSN, 1749. Yes, it is interesting that there was a high average for the years you mentioned.
Then, after it was over, after 1791, for 36 years, the GSN averaged 27.9, right through the Dalton minimum. If we compare those high-low periods to the Modern Maximum, we see that during the 11 years after the culmination of the Modern Maximum in 2003, the GSN has averaged 40.6, still 45.5% higher than the 36-year Dalton minimum period annual average.
We have a ways to go to reach the depths of the Dalton minimum, but as SC24 winds down and if SC25 is also weak, or even weaker, we could reach Dalton-minimum average solar conditions, and from that, we will probably also experience a significant temperature dropoff.
In less than a decade, there was a -1.9C change during the Dalton minimum, 1802 to 1810 (using http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/auto/Global/Complete_TAVG_complete.txt). SSN=0 for 1810.
The 68-years from 1936 to 2003 defined the Modern Maximum, when the average annual sunspot number (GSN) was 73.5, 22.7 higher, or 44.7% higher, than the prior 187-year average of 50.8.
The 1936-2003 Modern Maximum annual average GSN was 30.8% higher than the 266-year GSN annual average. “Grand” or not, it was an extended period of significantly higher solar activity.
Bob Weber says:
August 21, 2014 at 5:27 pm
That brings us to view a 68-year period from 1936 to 2003 as defining the Modern Maximum, when the average annual sunspot number (GSN) was 73.5
LEIF’S REPLY
As compared to the average of 68.6 for 1726-1791, so not so grand in anybody’s book.
My Reply
Why don’t you post the average annual sunspot number for the Dalton 1790-1830 and what it has been 2005-present?