The sun today is cue-ball blank, a perfect unmarred sphere:
Solar Dynamics Observatory HMI Continuum
The sun has just passed an entire calendar month with no sunspots. The last time this happened, in August 2008, the sun was in the nadir of a century-class Solar Minimum. The current stretch of blank suns shows that Solar Minimum has returned, and it could be as deep as the last one.
The last time a full calendar month passed without a sunspot was August 2008. At the time, the sun was in the deepest Solar Minimum of the Space Age. Now a new Solar Minimum is in progress and it is shaping up to be similarly deep. So far this year, the sun has been blank 73% of the time–the same as 2008.
Solar Minimum is a normal part of the solar cycle. Every ~11 years, sunspot counts drop toward zero. Dark cores that produce solar flares and CMEs vanish from the solar disk, leaving the sun blank for long stretches of time. These minima have been coming and going with regularity since the sunspot cycle was discovered in 1859.
Full story at Spaceweather.com
Here’s the sunspot data:
Meanwhile, the sun is putting out less solar energy towards the Earth, as this graph of PMOD composite monthly total solar irradiance (TSI) data shows:
What is most interesting is in the PMOD ( Physikalisch-Meteorologisches Observatorium Davos (PMOD) composite ) TSI data, measured by satellites, and endorsed by NOAA, shows a drop of 2 watts per square meter since it’s peak around 2003, to the present in 2019, where in the last month, it has literally dropped like a rock, creating the lowest value in the dataset so far.
The estimate of increased solar forcing from increased carbon dioxide and other GHG’s in Earth’s atmosphere could be up to 3 watts/square meter if model estimates are to be believed:
Changes in radiative forcing of long-lived greenhouse gases between 1979 and 2012.
This graph shows changes in radiative forcing of long-lived greenhouse gases between 1979-2012. These gases are carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), chlorofluorocarbon-12 (CFC-12), CFC-11, and fifteen other minor, long-lived, halogenated gases. The 15 other halogenated gases are CFC-113, tetrachloromethane (CCl4), trichloromethane (CH3CCl3); hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) 22, 141b and 142b; hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) 134a, 152a, 23, 143a, and 125; sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), and halons 1211, 1301 and 2402). The graph does not include other forcings, such as aerosols and changes in solar activity. Summary Total forcing in 1979 was 1.712 watts per square metre (W.m-2), and has steadily increased over time to 2.873 W.m-2 in 2012. Between 1979-2012, the largest contributors to radiative forcing have been CO2 and CH4. In 2012, the percentage contributions of each gas to total forcing was approximately: CO2: 64% CH4: 18% N2O: 6% CFC-12: 6% CFC-11: 2% 15 minor gases: 4% Forcing data are briefly summarized below. All the data are available in a later section as comma-separated values. The first value is the year, followed by forcing values (in W.m-2) for CO2, CH4, N2O, CFC-12, CFC-11, the 15-minor halogenated gases, and total forcing, respectively: 1979: 1.027, 0.419, 0.104, 0.092, 0.039, 0.031, 1.712 1980: 1.058, 0.426, 0.104, 0.097, 0.042, 0.034, 1.761 1990: 1.293, 0.472, 0.129, 0.154, 0.065, 0.065, 2.178 2000: 1.513, 0.494, 0.151, 0.173, 0.066, 0.083, 2.481 2010: 1.791, 0.504, 0.174, 0.170, 0.060, 0.106, 2.805 2012: 1.846, 0.507, 0.181, 0.168, 0.059, 0.111, 2.873References: Butler, J.H. and S.A. Montzka (2013-08-01) THE NOAA ANNUAL GREENHOUSE GAS INDEX (AGGI)[1], NOAA/ESRL Global Monitoring Division
It seems the sun has dimmed more than the usual amount at the end of solar cycle 24, and it could be a factor in the severe winter we are experiencing in many parts of the northern hemisphere.
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This February only had 28 days.
A “month” of 30 consecutive days with no counted spots days would be more impressive.
We now have 31 days with no counted spots. That would cover any month.
The post is incorrect, in August of 2008 there were 2.7 Sunspots recorded see here: – https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/space-weather/solar-data/solar-indices/sunspot-numbers/depricated/international/tables/table_international-sunspot-numbers_monthly-smoothed.txt?fbclid=IwAR2tjdB96Dulmra_r9RuKkaUxaeOSxMGiG6W6NJFkaB79u7v9oEuudl46Zc
The last time no Sunspots were recorded at all is February 1810. That is 269 years go.
Sorry my mistake 2009 years ago. But the first time since 1749 which is 269 years ago.
Uh, no.
http://www.sidc.be/silso/IMAGES/GRAPHICS/spotlessJJ/SC25_periods.png
According to Silso there were sunspots the 13th and the 21st.
http://www.sidc.be/silso/DATA/SN_d_tot_V2.0.txt
SC24 appears almost done. Feb 2019 was the month I chose in June last year to place the solar minimum.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/06/07/the-approaching-solar-cycle-24-minimum/
So far it looks good.
Looks like we are dropping into a cool period.
Since WW III can be expected 2019-2024
….(1997 book “Fourth Turning” on generational cycles)
We can expect the “brave and strong” to run to “fruitful countries”
and various countries to chime “we must share (food)!”
….as they fight for the top.
Snow in LA? Less than 70 degrees all month?
Will the China dictator (Premier for life) grab everything to feed their people?
So, the Baby Boom generation had it “lucky” and soon it is a battle.
Measuring TSI is a real problem. You need to do it from a satellite, and instruments must face the Sun, and die slowly while trying to measure it. We are not even sure if the TSI baseline is increasing or decreasing.
10.7 cm flux is easy to measure and unlike sunspots it never falls to zero.
Lowest monthly value was November 2018 so far (adjusted value). 10.7 flux usually bottoms between 3 month early to 1 month late respect to sunspots, so the minimum could be in.
But you are comparing apples and oranges.
TSI is a measure of the _total_ electromagnetic energy (i.e. all wavelengths) radiated by the Sun. It even includes the 10.7 cm flux. Its purpose to characterize the total energy radiated by the Sun, which is, on a human lifetime scale, amazingly constant [except for that pesky (and very tiny) EUV component which is energized periodically by solar magnetic activity].
10.7cm radiation flux is a proxy (better than sunspot counts) for measuring solar magnetic activity. It is not in any way interchangeable with TSI.
F10.7 is a proxy for total disc coronal UV/EUV production. Nothing more.
But UV/EUV flux does depend on magnetic activity to drive the heating process, so the solar cycle is very clearly imprinted (strong correlation to R2 >0.99) on the historical F10.7 record.
So F10.7 historical record can confirm when the cycle mins and maxs occur (and as Lief has shown how that daily UV flux changes the east orthogonal component of the geomagnetic strength.), but an X-ray flare/CME will also spike the F10.7 for a few days. The heating and particle release as those particle injections drive the corona to much higher temps as the CME gets thrown outward by the magnetic reconnection event/particle ejection process evolves through the suns corona. THus EUV flux goes up tremendously. And a CME/X-class flare can appear just about anytime in the rising and early descending maximum phase of the solar cycle.
For example, the largest flaring and CME’s (and resulting geomagnetic disturbances) of SC24 occurred in early Sept 2017, over 3 years past SC24’s cycle SSN peak in 2014.
Javier… I published that last year in April on GSjournal: 10.7 flux usually bottoms between 3 month early to 1 month late respect to sunspots, so the minimum could be in.
Because I submitted this finding to a Journal, i had to delete it. It is since December on Researchgate as preprint. So you can only use it if you make a reference:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329519943_The_Adjusted_Solar_Flux_the_Start_of_Solar_Cycle_25
Sorry, Patrick. I didn’t use it, I just commented it. Everything I know is based on somebody and I don’t use references in comments. If I had written it in an article for sure I would have cited the source.
Some solar cycle weirdnesses
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/02/26/a-chaotic-solar-cycle/
Currently:
Raining in Xian, (central) China,
raining in Shanghai, (eastern) China,
raining in California, (record Feb for snowfall in Sierras)
snowing in Colorado mountains (117% statewide SNOTEL snow water equivalent, ALL drainages above avg.),
raining in Virginia.
Snow in Forecast for a 2,500-Mile Path From California to Maine https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/us/snow-weather-forecast.html
Somehow the NH winter’s cold and rain/snow will be blamed on a trace gas increase.
Because… certain political power centers needs it to be so.
The NH was well above average temperature this winter. That’s according to both UAH and RSS satellite data.
“It seems the sun has dimmed more than the usual amount at the end of solar cycle 24, and it could be a factor in the severe winter we are experiencing in many parts of the northern hemisphere.”
—
Europe, and Asia are both getting an early taste of Spring, it’s North America that’s getting the sustained cold.
Perhaps so, however, according to the UAH_TLT satellite data, the northern hemisphere as a whole was much warmer than average this winter (‘winter’ in the NH being Dec-Feb).
Winter 2018/19 was the coldest in the US lower 48 states since that of 2012/13, but it was still +0.22C warmer than the 1981-2010 average for that region. Again according to UAH, across the northern hemisphere temperatures were +0.37 C warmer than average this winter, making it the 7th warmest northern hemisphere winter in the UAH record: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2019/03/uah-global-temperature-update-for-february-2019-0-36-deg-c/
Latest ECMWF run just got published minutes ago and it shows the deep cold retreating to the NW from N American continent.
https://on.windy.com/27bk3
The spaceweather.com web site, the number of spotless days for cycle 24 adds up to 1205. Isn’t that a Dalton Minimum kind of number of spotless days?
Spotless days in SC 24 is in the low several hundreds. Maybe like < 300 so far. Nothing close to 1205. 1205 days is like 3.3 years, which goes back to SC24 max of 2014 ( hardly plausible even from rough estimation).
What’s your source for an official count? As I mentioned, spaceweather.com lists the days on the left. I was gong with that count. Another source says cycle 24 started in late 2008. Going with that start date and the solarweather count, the number changes to 725, considerably greater than “the low several hundreds.”
You have to count spotless days for a cycle transition, not for a cycle.
Silso listed the number of spotless days as 332 for the current cycle transition on Jan 03 2019. Make that 360 now. It is already higher than four of the last five transitions, and there is always spotless days at the other side of the minimum, although not as many. I’d say we could go up to about 500 this transition.
http://www.sidc.be/silso/spotless
http://www.sidc.be/silso/IMAGES/GRAPHICS/spotlessJJ/SC25_SCvsNumber.png
Look at the circulation in the lower stratosphere over North America.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2019/03/02/0600Z/wind/isobaric/70hPa/orthographic=-100.27,60.27,679
Not sure how the tropopause height from Feb 28 proves your point but you are correct.
Look at the forecast of the jet stream at 250 hPa.
Solid frost in the northeast of the US.
Temperatures are forecast to dip to 10-20 degrees Fahrenheit below average and are likely be be even colder than that of average for January in many cases.
Sorry.
https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat_int/
The ongoing geomagnetic storm will strengthen the energy of the jet stream over Alaska.
https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/sat/satlooper.php?region=ak&product=ir
The name “Dimming and brightening” of the sun has been used in another paper so I am confused buy using it in this context.
M Wild has noted less clouds (due to less sulfur?)
Less clouds gives more sun hours and more global sun energy.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-11-00074.1
This gives us in Sweden 8% more sun energy and 10% more sun hours since 1983!
It has nothing to do with changes described in this tread.
If you look at a geomagnetic cutoff, you will understand the circulation during periods of low solar wind.
http://sol.spacenvironment.net/raps_ops/current_files/rtimg/cutoff.gif
Measurements have been made of the Earth’s magnetic field more or less continuously since about 1840. Some measurements even go back to the 1500s, for example at Greenwich in London. If we look at the trend in the strength of the magnetic field over this time (for example the so-called ‘dipole moment’ shown in the graph below) we can see a downward trend. Indeed projecting this forward in time would suggest zero dipole moment in about 1500-1600 years time. This is one reason why some people believe the field may be in the early stages of a reversal. We also know from studies of the magnetisation of minerals in ancient clay pots that the Earth’s magnetic field was approximately twice as strong in Roman times as it is now.
Even so, the current strength of the magnetic field is not particularly low in terms of the range of values it has had over the last 50,000 years.
http://www.geomag.bgs.ac.uk/education/reversals.html
Map of predicted annual rate of change of total intensity for 2015.0-2020.0
http://www.geomag.bgs.ac.uk/images/dFcolourful.jpg
You can see that the waves of ozone reach over North America far south.
Ozone is diamagnetic, with all its electrons paired. In contrast, O2 is paramagnetic, containing two unpaired electrons.
The increase of ozone in the lower stratosphere in winter leads to a strong decrease in surface temperature.
The boss, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said ‘we just got to see SC25 and that’s it, the end of the world as we know it.
Psst. Don’t tell her, but Alexandria is a city, not a name. She’s probably Alejandra and messed up the translation.
Nope, Alexandria is a proper girl’s name as well as name of two or more cities.
European royalty in 19th century shortened it into Alexandra. What the royalty does, the plebs follow e.g. lisping sound ‘s’ in Espagnol .
It is always cold in winter and in particular in the Northern Hemisphere over continental land masses but they get warmer during the summer, how cold varies from region to region. We have to remember that sea ice extent might effect the warming up of the surrounding land in summer, water requires more solar radiation to warm it up and in the arctic region it is further north. I will be interested to see how this solar minimum effects the arctic sea ice minimum this year and the land surrounding the arctic ocean. I remember last year when we had Forrest fires in the far north and high temperatures in many areas hopefully it will be different this summer.
Hopefully, not another year without a summer in 1816, graphs of solar cycles fit the bill. Maybe it wasn’t about volcanos after all.
It would seem to me based on all the evidence available, that IF there is an impact of the sun on Climate, it is isolated to charging the ocean heat. The effect is a combination of solar forcing and cloud formation. In turn, the ocean clearly is the dominant control knob of the atmospheric temperature. All one need to do is evaluate the mechanism possible to explain the almost perfect correlation of SST to atmospheric temperature. SW rad readily penetrates and warms the ocean, LW rad does not.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst3gl/from:1980/plot/uah6/from:1980
Dr Deanster
Well and good, but how does heat escape from the ocean and is there anything LW rad might do to slow its exit progress? If so, then LW rad would indeed contribute to ocean warming.
A good portion of heat escapes the ocean in the evaporation process. I would speculate the a good share is transported to the poles, where it readily is radiated into the coldest atmospheres where it escapes to space. The lions share is just stored and released in a chaotic fashion ….. hence, why you will never find a good correlation between solar or CO2 with atmospheric temperature, but you’ll find a practically identical correlation between SST and Atmopheric temp.
I’m not going to make an accusation, but the question is loaded to insinuate the flawed thinking of SKS, that CO2 is hindering that process. But the evidence argues against that, as if CO2 were playing any kind of significant role, we would be seeing identical effects in both the northern and southern seas. It’s not happening.
“ … and it could be a factor in the severe winter we are experiencing in many parts of the northern hemisphere.”
Whilst in other parts of the northern hemisphere we’ve been experiencing a very warm winter, with record breaking February temperatures in the UK.
Globally UAH are reporting February was 0.36C warmer than the 1981-2010 average, with the Northern Hemisphere being 0.46C warmer than average.
4th warmest February in the northern hemisphere since the UAH record began. Same in RSS satellite data. According to some on this site, if it’s cold in North America then it must be cold everywhere; data be damned!
Bellman/DWR54 …
Why would anyone expect anything different with a +PDO, +AMO effects and El Nino conditions since mid September?
Richard M,
I quoted the part of the head post that was suggesting that the sun dimming was possible a factor in the severe winter felt in “many parts” of the northern hemisphere.
The ‘record breaking temperatures’ in the UK are very dodgy, all at Weather stations that are fairly new. More to the point, the CET shows this Feb as the 15th warmest on record, and the winter the 17th warmest.
The record breaking temperatures were for the daytime. Temperatures were cooler at night. CET has this February as the warmest for maximum temperatures on record. The MO has the UK, England and Wales as the warmest maximum temperatures, with Scotland and Northern Ireland being a close 2nd place.
But regardless of specific records, it’s clear that the UK has not been experiencing a severe winter, and the northern hemisphere as a whole has not been especially cold.
Article excerpt:
So, what would be the effect on global average near-surface temperatures after 16 years of a total 2W/m2 decrease in solar irradiance? …… Actually, no effect that could actually be measured and/or recorded. Said effect could only be calculated, estimated, guesstimated and/or insinuated.
So, what would be the effect on global average sea-surface temperatures after 16 years of a total 2W/m2 decrease in solar irradiance? …… Actually, the effect should be reflected in the water temperature.
And just for completeness, global sea surface temperatures since 2003:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/hadsst3gl/from:2003/plot/hadsst3gl/from:2003/trend
Hmm?
DWR54, good job of charting the effects of ENSO.
Hmmm.
DWR54, it is a scientific FACT that ocean surface temperatures have been increasing ever since the LIA terminated in the mid-1800’s, which is EXACTLY why atmospheric CO2 ppm quantities have been “steadily and consistently” increasing each and every year as per the Mauna Loa Record (Keeling Curve Graph) attests to.
And “DUH”, given the FACT that the water temp has been slowly increasing during the past 170+- years, ……. then a calculated 2W/m2 decrease in solar irradiance during the past 16 years would do little more that “slightly retard” the current rate of “warming” ocean waters.
Great Lakes can freeze up to 90 percent.
Saying it’s not the Sun it’s CO2 is like when your falling its not gravity it’s CO2.
I updated my formulas on Researchgate and stick with my prediction that solar cycle 25 started in November 2018:
A Formula for the Start of a New Sunspot Cycle
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331063430_A_Formula_for_the_Start_of_a_New_Sunspot_Cycle
The report of an entire calendar month with no sunspots is premature… While NOAA/SWPC reported no sunspots during February in their daily solar region summaries, in its monthly Ri Report issued on March 1st the Solar Influences Data Analysis Center (SIDC)’s reported tiny solar cycle 25 sunspots on February 13th and 21st.
http://www.sidc.be/products/ri
The reason there are no sunspots is that the strength of the polar fields is increasing and that we will have A MUCH LARGER SUNSPOT CYCLE THEN EXPECTED.
We will know when Leif updates the UNFILTERED polar field strength.
Last mean strength was 66, meaning cycle 25 will be 10 percent above the first part of cycle 24…
Explanation here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328653713_The_Sun's_Adjusted_Polar_Fields_are_in_Phase_and_not_in_Anti-Phase
and here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330441356_Research_Polar_Fields
Explanation here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328653713_The_Sun's_Adjusted_Polar_Fields_are_in_Phase_and_not_in_Anti-Phase
We’re still doomed.
Please read with my comments.
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2019/03/02/hockeystick-con-job-co2-cant-cause-temperature-dog-legs/?fbclid=IwAR0aBr9uR7KwPUN1b0sDZVRXFxnkr-S8a_706nKiTb32JxS13gV71UVZbqQ