BOB HOYE In the 1990s, solar physicists, Penn and Livingston, called for a long decline in solar activity. This is the case and it is nice to see such work confirmed by events. Solar Cycles # 23 and 24 are the weakest since the early 1900s. The current run of consecutive Spotless Days is out…
The sun today is cue-ball blank, a perfect unmarred sphere: 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…
Abstract Jean‐Louis Le MouëlFernand LopesVincent Courtillot We first apply singular spectrum analysis (SSA) to the international sunspot number (ISSN; 1849‐2015) and the count of polar faculae (PF; 1906‐2006). The SSA method finds 22, 11 and 5.5‐year components as the first eigenvectors of these solar activity proxies. We next apply SSA to the ten Madden‐Julian oscillation…
Increased exposure for airline travelers at high altitudes. New data released by the Earth to Sky Calculus/Spaceweather.com high-altitude ballooning program show that atmospheric cosmic rays are intensifying for the 4th year in a row–an ironic side-effect of the decaying solar cycle. The new results are of interest to everyone from astronauts to air travelers. This…
WUWT’s resident solar expert Dr. Leif Svalgaard (and others) says ‘None of us alive have ever seen such a weak cycle’ and the panel he was on talk about the current state of our solar cycle at the AGU Fall Meeting. Here is Dr. Svalgaard’s current SSN plot: Watch the video, Leif is on the…
Looks like a double peak for cycle 24 is forming As many WUWT readers have noted in comments, October 2013 has been significantly more active than the previous several months, and we have not seen this level of activity since October 2011. At right, is the sun today showing several sunspots of significant size. No…
The NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center has updated their monthly graph set and it is becoming even more clear that we are past solar max, and that solar max has been a dud. “The slump” continues not only in sunspot activity, but also other metrics. And, tellingly, Dr. David Hathaway has now aligned his once…
Guest essay by David Archibald Recently, a number of newspaper articles spoke of the potential of cycle 25 to be “Weakest Solar Cycle In Almost 200 Years”. “We’re in a new age of solar physics,” said David Hathaway of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Here is a collection of solar measurements that…
From Dr. Benny Peiser and the GWPF We Really Don’t Understand Our Climate Something is happening to our sun. If history is anything to go by, the sun’s change of mood could affect us all by cooling the earth and throwing our climate change calculations into disarray. It might even be the case that the…
It is looking more and more like a double sunspot peak for solar cycle 24. Sunspot count is down again: A similar drop occurred in radio flux.
Yesterday, WUWT carried the headline: Coldest Spring In England Since 1891. This essay offers what could be an explanation for it. Judge for yourself. – Anthony Guest essay by David Archibald Back in 2006, I published my first paper in climate science. That paper, Solar Cycles 24 and 25 and Predicted Climate Response, predicted a…
The data from SWPC is in, and it is lethargic at best. Sunspot numbers took a hit, down to about 42, a delta of ~50 lower compared to the red prediction line. 10.7 cm solar radio flux took a similar hit:
Guest post by David Archibald Climate has real world consequences, and those operating in fields that will be affected by changing climate bring a different perspective to the problem of predicting what will happen. Bill Fordham, advising the grain industry in the Midwest, kindly sent me a copy of the advice he provides to his…
Guest post by David Archibald Solar Cycle 24 has already seen five consecutive colder winters. This is a link to a post about a German meteorologist who has seen the light. Eventually people will work their way back to where all the energy comes from. The amount and type of energy coming from the Sun…
The December data from NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center is in, and it looks more and more like the peak of solar cycle 24 has been reached, and that we are now past it. Even with documented problems like “sunspot count inflation” the sunspot count for December is quite low: Note the large difference between…
Have we hit solar max? NOAA’s SWPC recently updated their solar metrics graphs, and it seems to me like we may have topped out for solar cycle 24. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence of resurgence in any of the three metrics. Granted one month does not a cycle make, but it has been…
Guest post by David Archibald My papers and those of Jan-Erik Solheim et al predict a significant cooling over Solar Cycle 24 relative to Solar Cycle 23. Solheim’s model predicts that Solar Cycle 24, for the northern hemisphere, will be 0.9º C cooler than Solar Cycle 23. It hasn’t cooled yet and we are three…
Compiled by Joe D’aleo WeatherBell via NASA MSFC The current prediction for Sunspot Cycle 24 gives a smoothed sunspot number maximum of about 60 in the Spring of 2013. We are currently over three years into Cycle 24. The current predicted size makes this the smallest sunspot cycle in about 100 years. The prediction method…
by David Archibald Figure 1: Heliospheric Current Sheet Tilt Angle 1976 – 2012 The heliospheric current sheet tilt angle is currently at 67°. Solar maximum occurs when it reaches 74° – so a little bit further to go.
Guest post by David Archibald Three wise Norwegians – Jan-Erik Solheim, Kjell Stordahl and Ole Humlum – have just published a paper entitled “The long sunspot cycle 23 predicts a significant temperature decrease in cycle 24”. It is available online here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.1954v1.pdf The authors have found that Northern Hemisphere temperature changes by 0.21°C per year…
Guest post by David Archibald Predicting the amplitude of Solar Cycle 24 was a big business. Jan Janssens provides the most complete table of Solar Cycle 24 predictions at: http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/SC24.html Prediction activity for Solar Cycle 24 seemed to have peaked in 2007. In year before, Dr David Hathaway of NASA made the first general estimate…
Guest post by David Archibald Solar Cycle 24 is now three years old and predictions of the date of solar maximum have settled upon mid-2013. For example, Jan Janssens has produced this graph predicting the month of maximum in mid-2013, which is 54 months after the Solar Cycle 23/24 minimum in December 2008: For those…
By David Archibald Joe D’Aleo asked for my comments on NASA’s James Hathaway’s latest solar prediction, available here: http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/predict.shtml When I read May 2013 for solar cycle maximum, I thought “That is my prediction”. But then at the bottom of the page, they provide text files of their sunspot number prediction and F10.7 flux prediction. …
NOAA’s Space weather prediction center released their solar cycle progression updates, and it shows one of the largest jumps for all common solar metrics since cycle 24 began. Of course we know that the sunspot number has jumped significantly partly due to the recent large sunspot group that released X-class flares, but there’s more than…
Guest post by David Archibald When I started out in climate science in 2005, the climate people ignored the solar physics community. A casual perusal of the literature though indicated that the difference in climate outcome from Dikpati’s (NASA) estimate for Solar Cycle 24 amplitude of 190 and Clilverd’s (British Antarctic Survey) estimate of 42…
NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center posted an update to their graphs today. They show the largest gains in solar cycle 24 tracking metrics I’ve seen yet. See graphs below:
Let’s hope he does get out of the wrong side of the bed. The current sunspot count and 10.7 cm radio flux have increased in the latest NOAA SWPC graphs, shown below. but curiously, the Ap magnetic index remains low. Current solar status: Geomagnetic conditions: From Spaceweather.com : X-FLARE: March 9th ended with a powerful…