Have you been keeping an eye on Sol lately? One of the top astronomy stories for 2018 may be what’s not happening, and how inactive our host star has become.
The strange tale of Solar Cycle #24 is ending with an expected whimper: as of May 8th, the Earthward face of the Sun had been spotless for 73 out of 128 days thus far for 2018, or more than 57% of the time. This wasn’t entirely unexpected, as the solar minimum between solar cycle #23 and #24 saw 260 spotless days in 2009 – the most recorded in a single year since 1913.
Cycle #24 got off to a late and sputtering start, and though it produced some whopper sunspots reminiscent of the Sol we knew and loved on 20th century cycles past, it was a chronic under-performer overall. Mid-2018 may see the end of cycle #24 and the start of Cycle #25… or will it?
The story thus far… and the curious drama that is solar cycle #24. Credit: David Hathaway/NASA Marshall Spaceflight Center.
One nice surprise during Cycle #24 was the appearance of massive sunspot AR 2192, which popped up just in time for the partial solar eclipse of October 23rd, 2014. Several times the size of the Earth, the spot complex was actually the largest seen in a quarter century. But just as “one swallow does not a Summer make,” one large sunspot group couldn’t save Solar Cycle #24.
The partial eclipse of the Sun, October 23, 2014, as seen from Jasper, Alberta, shot under clear skies through a mylar filter, on the front of a 66mm f/6 apo refractor using the Canon 60Da for 1/8000 (!) sec exposure at ISO 100. The colors are natural, with the mylar filter providing a neutral “white light” image. The big sunspot on the Sun that day is just beginning to disappear behind the Moon’s limb. The mylar filter gave a white Sun, its natural colour, but I have tinted the Sun’s disk yellow for a more pleasing view that is not just white Sun/black sky. Image credit and copyright: Alan Dyer/Amazing Sky.net
The Sun goes through an 11-year sunspot cycle, marked by the appearance of new spots at mid- solar latitudes, which then slowly progress to make subsequent appearances closer towards the solar equator, in a pattern governed by what’s known as Spörer’s Law. The hallmark of a new solar cycle is the appearance of those high latitude spots. The Sun actually flips overall polarity every cycle, so a proper Hale Cycle for the Sun is actually 11 x 2 = 22 years long.
A big gaseous fusion bomb, the Sun actually rotates once every 25 days near its equator, and 34 days at the poles. The Sun’s rotational axis is also tipped 7.25 degrees relative to the ecliptic, with the northern rotational pole tipped towards us in early September, while the southern pole nods towards us in early March.
An animation of massive susnpot AR 2192 crossing the Earthward face of Sol from October 17th to October 29th, 2014. Credit: NASA/SDO.
What’s is store for Cycle #25? One thing’s for certain: if the current trend continues, with spotless days more the rule than the exception, we could be in for a deep profound solar minimum through the 2018 to 2020 season, the likes of which would be unprecedented in modern astronomy.
Fun fact: a similar dearth of sunspots was documented during the 1645-1715 period referred to as the Maunder Minimum. During this time, crops failed and the Thames River in London froze, making “frost fairs” along its frozen shores possible. Ironically, the Maunder Minimum also began just a few decades after the dawn of the age of telescopic astronomy. During this time, the idea of “spots on the Sun” was regulated to a controversial, and almost mythical status in mainstream astronomy.
@Leif said- … distance between the Earth and the Sun [we are closest in January] …
So, does January have more sunspots or higher F10.7 than other months?
Sandy, Minister of Future
does January have more sunspots or higher F10.7 than other months
No, but we are closer to the Sun. If you sit in front of a fire you feel a certain heat. Move further away and you feel less heat. Move closer and you feel more heat. Same thing with the Sun. This effect is MUCH larger [like 70 times] than any possible effect from solar activity.
@Leif- okay then. Thanks for the enlightenment. Back to the drawing board and wishing well, heh.
Sandy, Minister of Future
Summers in the northern hemisphere are about 4°F warmer than summers in the southern hemisphere due to the high heat capacity of the southern oceans, and also the northern summer is 2 to 3 days longer than southern summer as our orbital speed slows. You also have to consider the timing of the sequences of the advecting weather systems.
@ur momisugly Leif, Willis- I finally figured out what you’re talking about when you say freely falling. I heard about this concept long ago but hadn’t reconsidered until I reread it in Wiki.
The earth is literally falling towards the sun under its immense gravity.
Despite the thousandfold difference in mass, due to the relatively large distance between them, the barycenter is outside the Sun.
The barycenter is one of the foci of the elliptical orbit of each body.
Hence, the position of the barycenter varies too, and it is possible in some systems for the barycenter to be sometimes inside and sometimes outside the more massive body. This occurs where:
Note that the Sun–Jupiter system, witheJupiter = 0.0484, just fails to qualify:1.05 0.954.
* So now I have also remembered about the barycenter. And looking at some of the diagrams it seems the sun must be accelerating and deccelerating as it moves around the barycenter. Surely this must have some effect that we can measure on the outside?
Uh, also what is the common joke about the 43 yr switch?
Sandy, Minister of Future
seems the sun must be accelerating and deccelerating as it moves around the barycenter. Surely this must have some effect that we can measure on the outside
No. Think of an astronaut in an elliptical orbit around the Earth. He is also changing his speed all the time [speeding up when getting closer to the sun, slowing down when moving away], yet he feels nothing, being in free fall. The Earth is in an elliptical orbit around the sun, but neither the sun nor the earth feels the change of speed. An astronaut in a circular orbit around the earth is accelerating all the time [changing direction – deviating from a straight line – is also acceleration] yet neither he nor the Earth are affected. If the massive sun moving around the barycenter would be affected, how much more would the much smaller planet also moving around the barycenter not be affected?
“In Newtonian physics, free fall is any motion of a body where gravity is the only force acting upon it. In the context of general relativity, where gravitation is reduced to a space-time curvature, a body in free fall has no force acting on it” “The experimental observation that all objects in free fall accelerate at the same rate, as noted by Galileo and then embodied in Newton’s theory as the equality of gravitational and inertial masses, and later confirmed to high accuracy by modern forms of the Eötvös experiment, is the basis of the equivalence principle, from which basis Einstein’s theory of general relativity initially took off”
In an email I received —
The lunar laser ranging measurement data shows the accuracy of Newton’s gravitational constant G to one part in ten trillion per year. The likelihood of any “Nordtvedt effect” has now been ruled out to high precision, so now we can have full confidence in the Strong Equivalence Principle.
@Leif, Willis, Somebody- any constructive comments, critique, of Charvatova’s work on barycenter cycles relating to solar minima?
Sandy, Minister of Future
@Leif- a body in free fall has no force acting on it”
Thanks for that. I’ll look in another corner, heh.
Sandy, Minister of Future
http://www.einstein-online.info/spotlights/equivalence_principle.html
@Leif, Willis, Anybody- the image on the page suggest this looks like a giant Hadley cell. The thing I’m curious about is does the 40-year cycle show up on Earth weather cycles also. Another article said it flows about 30 kilometers per hour at Peak Sunspot Cycle but speeds up to 50 during the quiet spell. Also does it have some characteristic name like the Hadley cell. And does it rotate W to E?
from NASA …
Just as Earth’s global ocean circulation transports water and heat around the planet, the Sun has a conveyor belt, called the meridional plasma flow, in which plasma flows along the surface toward the poles, sinks, and returns toward the equator, transporting magnetic flux along the way. It has two branches, north and south, each taking about 40 years to perform one complete circuit. The upper belt skims the Sun’s surface, sweeping up knots of solar magnetism (decaying sunspots) and carrying them toward the poles. The structure and strength of this meridional flow is believed to play a key role in determining the strength of the Sun’s polar magnetic field, which in turn determines the strength of the sunspot cycles.
Last Updated: Aug. 7, 2017
Editor: Holly Zell
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/science/plasma-flow.html
Sandy, Minister of Future
It has two branches, north and south, each taking about 40 years to perform one complete circuit.
Not true. Old fake news. The circulation is shallow and completes in 16+ years. We know this from two pieces of evidence: 1) direct measurements of the circulation at depth, and 2) the polar fields predicts the next cycle so the circulation time must be short.
@Leif- Thanks for that. Fake NASA news haha. So if these currents are rising up to the equator and flowing to the poles and down and coming back to the equator then by the right-hand rule they both make north magnetic poles pointing in. What is this going to do. Hmmm. Do these currents have a popular tag name like the sweeper currents?
Sandy, Minister of Future
Do these currents have a popular tag name like the sweeper currents?
The meridional circulation. The ‘conveyor belt’.
And the current is a matter current [moving materiel stuff, like a river], so not an electric current, so the right-hand rule does nit apply. It is more complicated than that.
The truth is, the Sun has only a tiny effect on climate, which is the conclusion of the climate models in the 5AR and also of basic energy balance for a blackbody, (1-albedo)S/4 = emissivity*sigma*T^4, which gives
dT/dS = T/4S = 0.05 K/(W/m2)
The Sun or Maunder Minimum didn’t cause the LIA — volcanoes and feedbacks did:
“Abrupt onset of the Little Ice Age triggered by volcanism and sustained by sea-ice/ocean feedbacks,” Gifford H. Miller et al, GRL (2013).
DOI: 10.1029/2011GL050168
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2011GL050168/full
@David Appell- you really believe CO2 causes climate warming, when all it has to show for 300 yrs is greening?
You said- The Sun or Maunder Minimum didn’t cause the LIA — volcanoes and feedbacks did:
This is wrong. The climate cooling came first and caused the earth to shrink, increasing pressure on magma, and spinning faster, increasing centrifugal force on magma, thus causing more eruptions. Plus the effects are not long lasting, one to three years.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
According to wiki, Pinatubo eruption in 91, a VEI6, lowered global temp by 0.5 dgC until 93. Two years of cooling.
I have posted the following alert to several sites and to a US senator. Links to the 18 articles i read are available by request in comments. Most from Climate,etc, and WUWT.
NOAA, NASA, and the IPCC have failed humanity, and we’re all in for a nasty surprise … Abrupt Climate Change. This is a summary and warning i put together:
The MsM and warmist alarmists are wrong. It is the heighth of hubris and arrogance to think humans, in the space of 150 years, can change thermal cycles that are thousands of years long and have existed for millenia. The thermal mass of the land and oceans is enormous. The temperature of deep, still, parts of the ocean have barely risen one degree in 22,000 years, the last glacial max.
My reading of the climate tea leaves says we’re already past the interglacial plateau of relatively stable climate.
For the last three thousand years, Since 1000 BC, the end of the Minoan Warm Period, the global temperature trend has been -0.5 to -0.7 dgC per 1000 yrs, projecting full glacial of 8 dgC in another 7,000 yrs. Another clue, the obliquity dropped below 23.5 degrees around 1300 AD, the onset of the Wolf Minimum. Now the glacial cold lurking in the deep ocean, held in check by obliquity for 10,000 years, has been set free, ending the Holocene Interglacial. We are in the transition zone to glacial cold, expect Finoscandian ice sheets to start in 2000 yrs.
Up until two weeks ago I was thinking we are coming into a grand solar minimum. But I’m reconsidering that after rereading some articles on skeptic climate blogs. I now believe we entered a ‘Micro- IceAge’ in 2004 when Bob Weber’s fig.10 showed a drop in 10.7 cm solar flux, leading to ocean cooling. I’m calling this a ‘Micro’ because I don’t expect it to last more than solar cycle 24, 25, and 26. Then there will be maybe 7 years to transition back to normal global temperatures; say by 2050.
What the mainstream media is not highlighting is this last winter was the coldest in 40 years in many countries in the northern hemisphere. North Western European countries on the Atlantic coast reported last summer was the coldest in 40 Years also.
Also this spring has been cold and longer than usual which will affect the growing season.
During the Little Ice Age the temperature dropped about half a degree globally. As you can see from the Delingpole essay, it has dropped by 0.56 degrees already.
This is what we can expect starting from last Dec; some winters extremely cold, some wet cool springs to kill crops, some cold summers, and more frequent and severe storms. The storminess index went from 6.5 to 14 during the LIA. This slide into cold is showing up in German weather station records where the last 30 yrs of winter (DJF) are trending -19 dgC per 1000 yrs, much faster than the slow decline to normal glacials.
I expect in the next ten years one billion will actually starve due to crop failures*, and one billion will be eaten by stronger omnivores; feral dogs, cats, and … humans.
As the legal beagles like to say, ‘Time is of the essence,’ so the sooner you act, the better your chances of survival.
Sandy, Minister of Future
*NB- the WHO reports 800 mln suffer from hunger, 10 mln die from starvation each yr, 60 mln die from disease each yr.
So now thats 70 mln / yr, plus more food stress, weakening immune system, more disease, amplified by cold climate / storm stress, could easily be 100 mln /yr … Thats 1 Bln / 10 yrs.
Sandy, Minister of Future
@David Appell said- because they accept and communicate the AGW consensus.
No way is ‘consensus’ science. Like 97% say the earth is flat. Ha ha ha ha … You dont vote on facts!
Sandy, Minister of Future
David Appell (@davidappell) May 27, 2018 at 7:19 pm
Well, let’s see. I’m not banned at RC, they just censor people’s scientific opinions that they don’t like.
Now, Anthony should be the one to answer this, but as far as I know, nobody has ever been banned from WUWT because “they accept and communicate the AGW consensus”.
Now you certainly can get banned for violation of site policy, and people have been. But that’s true on every site.
However, I know of no one who has been banned for “accepting the AGW consensus”, and I see lots of folks commenting here who do just that.
That said, I’m just a guest author, not a moderator, so Anthony would be the one to ask.
w.
@Leif said- And the current is a matter current [moving materiel stuff, like a river], so not an electric current, so the right-hand rule does nit apply. It is more complicated than that.
I bet it is more complicated. Matter at 6000 degrees? Do you have a link to a PDF?
Thanks,
Sandy, Minister of Future
The basic mechanism is explained well in this:
http://www.leif.org/EOS/Choudhuri-forecast.pdf
@Anybody- is there a ground station located between 65 and 70 north that measures the incident solar radiation?
I’m looking for a chart from 2000 to see if we’re getting way below 500 watts per meter squared and preparing for the next ice age.
Sandy, Minister of Future
@All- this document showing ground Station solar installation. It looks like one chart shows a cooling trend from 2000 of about 4 watts per meter squared per decade. So after this micro Ice Age We may just keep stair stepping down for the next four thousand years. Stay tuned.
from satellite and ground measurements: Comparisons and challenges
Laura M. Hinkelman Paul W. Stackhouse Jr. Bruce A. Wielicki Taiping Zhang Sara R. Wilson
First published: 15 August 2009
https://doi.org/10.1029/2008JD011004
Sandy, Minister of Future
Sandy – minister of future
indeed, my results do show that it already started globally cooling.
http://breadonthewater.co.za/2018/05/04/which-way-will-the-wind-be-blowing-genesis-41-vs-27/
I did not know there was somebody else as well who saw this..
Anyway, the cooling it is not so much.
In any case, we already made the switch [that nobody except me can see in the relevant graphs]
and we have started to cycle up again. It means it will get warmer again, about 20 years from now. So, I don’t think you have to worry much.
We are about 0.2K down since 2000, on average, for an observer standing and measuring on the equator.
Best wishes,
H