Solar Cycle 24 May Be Starting

Well dang, it’s about time. Watt’s Up With That? has the details.

Leif Svalgaard has been saying for sometime now that Solar Cycle 24 seems to be getting underway. Seeing sunspot group 1024 today, I’m tending to agree.

The magnetic polarity (seen on the SOHO magnetogram)  of the spot group combined with the middle latitude indicates it is a cycle 24 spot.

From Spaceweather.com

The most active sunspot of the year so far is emerging in the sun’s southern hemisphere: movie. Sunspot 1024 has at least a dozen individual dark cores and it is crackling with B-class solar flares. This morning, amateur astronomer David Tyler caught one of the flares in action from his backyard solar observatory in England:

Read the whole thing here.

Sunspots Still Scarce

Joseph D’Aleo says we are heading towards a record for sunspotless days in a year. We are sitting at #3 for the least this century, and heading for #2. Oh, by the way, that means it could get real cold for a long time. Check out all the facts below. ICECAP is the place to find this kind of information.

By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow

One of our loyal Canadian Icecap readers asked us to comment on the fact we are now at the end of November, in the top five years with the most sunspotless days the last century and heading towards a #3 or even #2 finish depending on how many spotless days we have in December. Here is a comparison of monthly spotless days in this cycle 23 minimum (red) versus the last cycle 22 minimum in the mid 1990s (blue).

See larger image here

Notice how quiet and prolonged this minimum has been compared to the last minimum. As of today, December 3, we have had 241 spotless days in 2008, enough to put us in a tie for 3rd place with 1954. Today will extend the latest string of sunspotless days to 14, 3 this month. If we match November’s 16 spotless days in December, we will be in a virtual tie for second place with 1912 (with 253 spotless days) behind just 1913 which had 311 spotless days (data source SIDC).

See larger image here

Notice how 2007 and 2008 are both in the top 10.

So far in the solar minimum after cycle 23, we have had 483 spotless days, the most since cycles 14-16, in the early 1900s. Note in cycle 14, three years came in the top 10 for spotless days, 1911, 1912, 1913.  This is the second year in this cycle in the top 10. 1912 was the second high spotless year after cycle 14.

QUIET SOLAR PERIODS ARE COLD PERIODS

Case in point the Maunder Minimum during the little ice age, virtually spotless for decades/centuries from the late 1400s to early 1700s. The early 1800 quiet sun period known as the Dalton Minimum was a mini ice age. Cold returned in the late 1800s and early 1900s with again a declining sun.

See this story in the Toronto Star by Adam Mayers from February 2007. It talks about 1911/12 winter, the worst winter of the century for that city.

“It may seem cold this week, but it is nothing, nothing, compared with the winter of 1912, a year that remains in the record books as the worst winter of the past 100 years. By mid-January, it was so cold Toronto harbour was frozen solid. By early February, the near-shore lake ice was a metre thick, and you could skate from Toronto to Hamilton if you had the time. By the middle of the month, everyone was taking bets on whether the lake was frozen over. By month-end, it was. It was the rumour that the lake ice was finally solid from Toronto to Rochester that brought a huge crowd to Sunnyside Park on the afternoon of Feb. 11, 1912. They wanted to witness what the Star called a once-in-a-lifetime experience, “a spectacle they had never seen before and may never witness again.”

Read more here (UPDATED). See David Archibald’s post on Warwick Hughes site on the evidence for and implications of another Dalton Minimum.

NASA: Least Sunspots Since 1954

Beware!The Ice Age Cometh. More evidence that the new ice age is coming. For all the hot air that Algore blows about global warming, the evidence is against him. Take a look at this from Science@NASA.

Sept. 30, 2008: Astronomers who count sunspots have announced that 2008 is now the “blankest year” of the Space Age.

As of Sept. 27, 2008, the sun had been blank, i.e., had no visible sunspots, on 200 days of the year. To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go back to 1954, three years before the launch of Sputnik, when the sun was blank 241 times.

“Sunspot counts are at a 50-year low,” says solar physicist David Hathaway of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. “We’re experiencing a deep minimum of the solar cycle.”

A spotless day looks like this:

The image, taken by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) on Sept. 27, 2008, shows a solar disk completely unmarked by sunspots. For comparison, a SOHO image taken seven years earlier on Sept. 27, 2001, is peppered with colossal sunspots, all crackling with solar flares: image. The difference is the phase of the 11-year solar cycle. 2001 was a year of solar maximum, with lots of sunspots, solar flares and geomagnetic storms. 2008 is at the cycle’s opposite extreme, solar minimum, a quiet time on the sun.

And it is a very quiet time. If solar activity continues as low as it has been, 2008 could rack up a whopping 290 spotless days by the end of December, making it a century-level year in terms of spotlessness.

Hathaway cautions that this development may sound more exciting than it actually is: “While the solar minimum of 2008 is shaping up to be the deepest of the Space Age, it is still unremarkable compared to the long and deep solar minima of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.” Those earlier minima routinely racked up 200 to 300 spotless days per year.

Above: A histogram showing the blankest years of the last half-century. The vertical axis is a count of spotless days in each year. The bar for 2008, which was updated on Sept. 27th, is still growing. [Larger images: 50 years, 100 years]

Some solar physicists are welcoming the lull.

“This gives us a chance to study the sun without the complications of sunspots,” says Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “Right now we have the best instrumentation in history looking at the sun. There is a whole fleet of spacecraft devoted to solar physics–SOHO, Hinode, ACE, STEREO and others. We’re bound to learn new things during this long solar minimum.”

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As an example he offers helioseismology: “By monitoring the sun’s vibrating surface, helioseismologists can probe the stellar interior in much the same way geologists use earthquakes to probe inside Earth. With sunspots out of the way, we gain a better view of the sun’s subsurface winds and inner magnetic dynamo.”

“There is also the matter of solar irradiance,” adds Pesnell. “Researchers are now seeing the dimmest sun in their records. The change is small, just a fraction of a percent, but significant. Questions about effects on climate are natural if the sun continues to dim.”

Pesnell is NASA’s project scientist for the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a new spacecraft equipped to study both solar irradiance and helioseismic waves. Construction of SDO is complete, he says, and it has passed pre-launch vibration and thermal testing. “We are ready to launch! Solar minimum is a great time to go.”

Coinciding with the string of blank suns is a 50-year record low in solar wind pressure, a recent discovery of the Ulysses spacecraft. (See the Science@NASA story Solar Wind Loses Pressure.) The pressure drop began years before the current minimum, so it is unclear how the two phenomena are connected, if at all. This is another mystery for SDO and the others.

Who knew the blank sun could be so interesting? More to come…

Still think the Goreacle knows what he is talking about? I can only hope people will wake up to the fraud of Global Warming. The sunspots, and NASA (which are very reliable) refute what Algore is saying. Which would you believe. SnakeOil Salesman, or hard science?

h/t ICECAP

Solar Cycles And Global Cooling

Here’s some food for thought from ICECAP.

Ultralong Solar Cycle 23 and Possible Consequences

By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM

In 1610, shortly after viewing the sun with his new telescope, Galileo Galilei made the first European observations of Sunspots. Daily observations were started at the Zurich Observatory in 1749 and with the addition of other observatories continuous observations were obtained starting in 1849. As a climatologist, I always found it amazing that we have had regular sunspot data far longer than we have had reliable coverage of temperature or precipitation.

Monthly averages (updated monthly) of the sunspot numbers show that the number of sunspots visible on the sun waxes and wanes with an approximate 11-year cycle, The last five cycles are shown in the diagram below.

See larger image here

You can see from this diagram that the cycles are not equal in magnitude (smoothed sunpot number peaked 110 to 200) or period (9.8 to 12+ years). If you superimpose the five cycles you can see this even more dramatically. The chart has the annual average sunspot number and starts with the year of the solar minimum (lowest sunspot average). You can see that cycles 19, 21, and 22 were higher amplitude and shorter periods (bottoming out in years 9-10 and then rebounding rapidly). Cycles 20 and 23 were less amplified and longer. Cycle 20 lasted about 11.8 years. It appears from the evidence we will present that cycle 23 has not yet bottomed out and thus is at least 12 years long.

See larger image here

See in this analysis how longer, quieter cycles correlate with global cooling and shorter, stronger cycles with warming. The current cycle 23 appears to be the longest in at least a century and may project to quieter subsequent cycles and cooling temperatures ahead.

Global Cooling: Signs Say Yes

I’ve found a couple of great articles pointing out the continued global cooling trend. The first points out our continuing winter, the record snowfall, and the unusual places it has snowed.

IT STARTED IN THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE WINTER OF 2007

A rare winter snowstorm dusted South Africa’s commercial capital Johannesburg early on Wednesday June 26 closing mountain passes and claiming at least one life. ‘SNOWBURG’ trumpeted the headline of Johannesburg’s Star newspaper. Gleeful children built snowmen in Johannesburg’s Zoo Lake Park, while families could be seen carrying snowballs back to their cars, fast melting souvenirs of the city’s first significant snowfall, the first real snowfall in more than a generation.

On July 9th 2007, thousands of Argentines cheered in the streets of Buenos Aires got covered by snow. The Argentinean capital was white again after nearly a century.

Last time it snowed there was June 22nd 1918. It snowed for the first time in history in some towns of the Santa Fe Province. The snow event followed a bitterly cold month of May that saw subfreezing temperatures, the coldest in 40 years in Buenos Aires. That cold wave contributed to an energy crisis and dozens of deaths. This 2007 May figured among the coldest in recent decades also in Uruguay and Southern Brazil.

Then came summer but the cold didn’t give up entirely, January 10 saw snow in southern Argentina hilly areas, the equivalent of a July snow in Denver.

In Australia which experienced its coldest June on record, Australian ski resorts enjoyed the best season in seventeen years with snow dumping across New South Wales and Victoria. Summer there too was cool and ended very early with snow by late February (the equivalent of our August). We have barely had a summer this year,” said Gary Grant, New South Wales Perisher Blue’s general manager of marketing. “It’s felt as though it’s remained cold since the end of the 2007 season, apart from a few warm days, there air has always had a nip in it.”

In September, Antarctica set a new record for ice extent in the satellite era and ironically stayed at record high levels through much of this past summer. Currently the ice extent is running 60% ahead of last year at this time.

THEN CAME THE NORTHERN WINTER

The trend for record snows in some unusual areas continued but even some normally snowy areas had all time records snowfall. In the United States the heavy snow band ran from the Pacific Northwest through the Central Rockies across the Plains and Upper Midwest, Great Lakes into northern New England. The snow was even heavier in southern Canada.

In the Oregon Cascades, the snow was so heavy, roofs were collapsing. In Steamboat Springs, CO, over 100 inches fell in every winter month for the first time ever and set a new record for seasonal snowfall with 450 inches with weeks more to go. Rendevous Bowl which has a 33 year average of 320 inches, had 566 inches as of March 25.

Madison, Wisconsin blew away there all-time snow record 100.4 inches of snowing exceeding their old record by 33%! New seasonal snowfall records were set in Michigan in places like Ann Arbor , in Ohio where Youngstown had well over 100 inches, 52” above normal and for the winter (December through February for Burlington, VT and Concord, NH.

Much More Here

Now we have this from Anthony Watts. It’s about the solar cycle that hasn’t started yet, and may portend more an extended cooling.

Solar cycle minimum at the earliest in second half of 2008?

Current SOHO: The Sun is blank again

The outlook for solar activity continues to be pushed further back as cycle 23 spots continue, such as the group of 3 seen last week, but no cycle 24 spots are being seen. NASA’s convened panel of scientists obviously missed their mark of consensus in predicting cycle 24 would start in March 2008. There is growing concern over the delay in the start of cycle 24. Now a new prediction portends more delay. If we go to May or later before the solar min is reached, cycle 23 will be the longest cycle since the late 1800s. Now it is looking like cycle 24 may not get started until late 2008 or early 2009.

The rest is here: Watts Up With That?

You can decide for yourself, but considering global warming stopped in 1998 and cooling has begun, I’d say the Goracle has explaining to do. Of course he won’t debate anyone on the real facts, so we have to decide for ourselves.