UPDATE: Some commenters got the wrong idea about this article, see the footnote.
Our resident solar physicist Dr. Leif Svalgaard is one of the scientists involved in the effort
Dear SILSO user,
Mon, Jun 22, 2015 11:42 am
Over the past 4 years a community effort has been carried out to revise entirely the historical Sunspot Number series. A good overview of the analyses and identified corrections is provided in the recent review paper:
Clette, F., Svalgaard, L., Vaquero, J.M., Cliver, E. W.,“Revisiting the Sunspot Number. A 400-Year Perspective on the Solar Cycle”, Space Science Reviews, Volume 186, Issue 1-4, pp. 35-103.
Now that the new data series has been finalized, we are about to replace the original version of our sunspot data
by an entirely new data set on July 1st. On this occasion, we decided to simultaneously introduce changes in several conventions in the data themselves and also in the distributed data files.
There are so many diverse changes that we cannot guarantee that everything will work perfectly on the first try.Our team is too small to make full prior simulations. Therefore, multiple careful consistency checks will be done on July 1st itself, which will slow down the processing. So, please anticipate some delays compared to an ordinary month.
The most prominent change in the Sunspot Number will be the choice of a new reference observer, A.Wolfer (pilot observer from 1876 to 1928) instead of R. Wolf himself. This means dropping the conventional 0.6 Zürich scale factor, thus raising the scale of the entire Sunspot Number time series to the level of modern sunspot counts. This major scale change may thus strongly affect some user applications. Be prepared!
Regarding data files, various files will be replaced by new ones, with new more homogeneous names and new internal column formats. The included information will sometimes change: combining data (e.g. hemispheric numbers together with total numbers), separating data (monthly smoothed numbers in a separate file) or adding new values that were not provided previously (standard errors).
All those changes will be explained in the information accompanying our data, on the web site of the World Data Center SILSO. While the primary files will all be replaced in early July, some other changes will still occur in the next two or three months. During this transitory phase, we thus invite you to visit the SILSO Web site to keep track of the changes, as we are preparing this major transition now scheduled for July 1st, 2015.
An important remark for our faithful observers: the current transition in the sunspot number processing does not change anything to the way you enter your data. So, just proceed as usual on July 1st. Your past k personal
coefficients will simply be recomputed relative to the new re-calibrated sunspot number. We are working on this right now. By the way, the new processing software will open the way towards a better determination of the evolution of each station and so, a better feedback to our observers will become possible in the future.
In the coming weeks, please visit our SILSO Web site:
____________________
Dr.Laure Lefevre
Royal Observatory of Belgium WDC-SILSO
UPDATE: A number of commenters got the wrong idea about this article, conflating the process with the sort of questionable adjustment techniques For example, Dr. Svalgaard comments:
As the text says all observers should continue the way they have always done. There is no such as ‘the traditional count’ for observers. That concept is completely local to the SIDC [now SILSO]
Frederick Colbourne adds:
These adjustments (at the very least) compensate for the faulty decision by one important observer to use an instrument that did not have sufficient resolving power to count the sunspots properly.
Willis Eschenbach sums it up:
Dear heavens, this resistance to correcting the mistakes of the past is most peculiar. Mosh is quite correct. The sunspot count of the past was differently calculated, due to changes in counting methods which are both well known and well explained.
What they have now done is to use the same methodology from start to finish.
Look, there have been some bogus “adjustments” to climate records by various miscreants. But that doesn’t mean we can just use what we have in front of us in any field. Sunspots are a good example. We know where we changed methodology in the past. We know the dates that calculation method changed, and how the method changed. As a result of the change we have two incompatible sets of numbers.
So should we just continue to use the existing sunspot dataset, which consists of two sets of DIFFERENT NUMBERS which were calculated in DIFFERENT WAYS and then just spliced together? That would be nuts, no?
Instead what we need to do, and what Leif and the others did, was to go back to the underlying observations, and to use a single unified clearly-defined method of counting sunspots from the start of the record to the end of the record. This single internally coherent dataset replaces the SPLICED DATASET of the past.
Anyone who thinks that using the same counting method from start to finish is somehow bad and wrong, well, they’re free to use the old spliced dataset … and if you do, I’m free to laugh at your adherence to past mistakes.
Note well that this says nothing about the endless adjustments to the temperature record, which may or may not be justified in any particular case, and which are nowhere near as clear-cut and clean as the sunspot count.
My viewpoint is that this adjustment corrects a clear mistake, and therefore should be welcomed. – Anthony Watts
I have a non-polemical question here that involves clouds, not sunspots. (Haven’t seen anything here to make me seriously doubt the revisions so far…)
According to the chart shown earlier, high level clouds are increasing and low level clouds are decreasing. My question is this: Would this tend to cool the Earth? Low level clouds tend to trap heat, while high level clouds tend to reflect heat back into space, or so I understand. So both trends would work toward cooling, if my understanding is correct.
Honestly interested in answers. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it makes a big difference exactly when & where the clouds have changed. And there could be correlations with other things, including a dampening feedback to generally warming climate, or cosmic ray flux, or whatever.
Indulge my ignorance, if you would. I’m interested in learning more.
I wondered the same, and think it is so. How might a solar effect change the height, and likely the character, of the clouds? There are all sorts of possible mechanisms. And, of course, it ain’t necessarily the sun, leastways not entirely.
================
Will be continuing to use the layman’s sunspot count.
I think that it is very evident that Leifs staunch belief that the sun has little effect on the Earth’s climate is affecting the impartiality of his science. Which sadly is becoming more and more of a problem with an increasing number of scientists. No longer is a lot of science, science based, but “feeling” based and then only accepting the data and evidence supporting their “feelings”.
Unless you actually read my papers on this, you should not make such unwarranted statements.
Read the papers, point out where I go wrong, then draw your conclusions.
I have actually read some of your papers and looked at your site, I have also read some of other peoples papers and have read other learned peoples reviews of yours and others work. I have also seen how you react to people critiquing your work (not well). I do not think that anything I or anyone else says will change you belief, and you are welcome and entitled to your belief, but I don’t think that the current science is totally in step with your beliefs and it seems that your beliefs govern your science more than they should rather that the science governing ones beliefs.
If I’m wrong – then I’m wrong. But from reading quite an considerable amount in this area this is how you come across as.
Well, you could be more specific. Which people, which other papers, etc.
And you are partly correct that ‘current science’ [CAGW etc] is not totally in step with my conclusions [not ‘beliefs’]
It would be interesting to see a plot of solar cycle length with the new adjustments to see if it changes much.
The times of maximum and minimum did not change significantly, but the concept of a ‘the solar cycle length’ is not well-defined as solar cycle overlap and the computed maxima and minima times depend on the smoothing procedure used. So the concept is not a useful one.
It seems logical that the Earths climate system, particularly the ocean cycles are driven in part by how long the Sun is heating or cooling, which would have more of an effect on general circulation than temperature. Why does the Northern hemisphere temperatures appear to correlate with solar cycle length. Is it one of those things that can be smoothed with the right parameter to make it look like a decadal temperature profile? I have never tried to compute the attribute but the correlations I see look very intriguing.
Well, it does not correlate. That study you are thinking about [Friis-Christensen & Lassen] was deeply flawed and whatever apparent correlation that was manufactured has gone away.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/imgheat/temsol2.gif
Check out:
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/DamonLaut2004.pdf
The new adjusted series is in the proud tradition of Wolf and Wolfer themselves:
Wolf adjusted his precious historical record upwards by 25% in 1876 and Wolfer
adjusted the values 1800-1830 down by almost a factor of 2, in effect creating the Dalton Mimimum:
http://www.leif.org/EOS/Wolfer-1902-Revision-SSN.pdf
Adjustment is an ongoing process dictated by new data and new insights.
Can we cut down on the chat/battering one liners here?
If you have something serious to say about sunspots, fine, supportive papers links good.
No doubt sunspots or progression between sun pole reversals has major impact on earth. Best times serious measurement is up to grabs for better given historic by telescopes a few hundred years ago. If getting 50 emails a day on comments here, hard to follow. We can also tract sun historically by isotopes like beryllium 10. It will take ten years of future data (cycle 24 … 25)+ to show if true if entering sun weakening or repeat of Maunder or Dalton, yet no doubt just past a solar activity high, could be cosmic rays and clouds.
Anyways, please refrane if your comment is less than ten words long and is emotional.
– JP
Hey, start your own site and then you make the rules.
Nonsense. The TIMED SEE data are used as is. No change at all. The SEM data has been scaled to match the TIMED SEE data and F10.7.
Well I have read the paper, and I will give you the benefit of the doubt on the over weighting of some of the current counts, only because your work will be easily verifiable. However when you say things like this:
“lsvalgaard
June 23, 2015 at 12:25 am
No, not since 1700.
During the Maunder Minimum there were extended periods were the observers said “I have not seen any spots this year”. Hoyt and Schatten treated such verbal descriptions a real observations and entered into their database an impossible 365 days of observations with zero spots. This is, of course, nonsense”
I have to wonder .. did you miss that whole 2008 lull? I wonder.. had we not had Soho and SDO to count tiny spots if we too couldn’t have said I have not seen any spots this year…. of course in a hundred years scientists might call that NONSENSE too. Be careful while you trample the records of the past, you do have an agenda whether you choose to recognize it or not. Your new nasty persona is part of it.
You miss the point. It is very likely that there were very few spots, but what we are interested in are actual observations, and when you look at the frequency with which some observers were even looking at the sun, you find that typically that is only a few times a year, so when they say that they didn’t see any spots during a certain year, it does not mean that we can enter 365 genuine observations of zero spots into the database. Anyway this issue is not controversial, there is general agreement that such spurious claims of complete coverage should be disregarded, see e.g. section 3.2 of http://www.leif.org/research/Revisiting-the-Sunspot-Number.pdf\
As for agenda, spare us your BS.