solar cycle 24

baldieman

Kevster wrote: »

Sorry to just jump in here guys but I have a question that I think is quite relevant: Considering we are soon to be heading to a solar max, don't you think that Global Warming sceptics will use this to justify their scepticism? ...and people will be ill-informed enough to believe them.

Kevin

skepticism is healthy, just because one is sceptic, does'nt necessarily mean a non believer, but keeping an open mind.
It will be interesting to see how this solar cycle develops and what effect if any, there is on global or local temperatures over the next few years?

Kevster

Is the past few days any indication of the future? I mean, I've never experienced such heat before. Are we going to be going into extremes of climate like that? - i.e. severely hot summers; severely cold winters.

Thrill

After a flurry of sunspots in July that included the large sunspot 1024, which prompted experts to announce that the solar minimum was all but over, the sun has gone on strike again. SC24 continues to stall. It is now 41 days since the last sunspot.


Sunspot 1024...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7zdlcHCshc

This video is the complete history of Sunspot 1024 of Solar Cycle 24. This was the largest and best defined Sunspot in over 2 years . This area was able to kick off 2 decent C-class flares. There was a total of 38 noteable flares while this area as it crossed the face of the Sun . This active area first emerged on the Eastern Area of the Sun on 6--30-2009 where it quickly formed and faded in less then 24 hours. Then on 7-3-2009 it rapidly reformed. It moved beyond viewing crossing the Western Limb on 7-10-2009 giving us a faster then normal transit in this latitude

---

QUIET SUN: According to NOAA sunspot counts, the longest stretch of spotless suns during the current solar minimum was 52 days in July, August and Sept. of 2008. The current spate of blank suns is putting that record in jeopardy. There have been no sunspots for almost 42 days and there are none in the offing. Deep solar minimum continues.

Thrill

Are sunspots on the way out? According to a study by Bill Livingston and Matt Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, they will disappear altogether in by 2015.

ARE SUNSPOTS DISAPPEARING? Sunspots are made of magnetism. The "firmament" of a sunspot is not matter but rather a strong magnetic field that appears dark because it blocks the upflow of heat from the sun's fiery depths. Without magnetism, there would be no sunspots.
That's what makes the following graph a little troubling:

According to Bill Livingston and Matt Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, sunspot magnetic fields are waning. The two respected solar astronomers have been measuring solar magnetism since 1992. Their technique is based on Zeeman splitting of infrared spectral lines emitted by iron atoms in the vicinity of sunspots. Extrapolating their data into the future suggests that sunspots could completely disappear within decades. That would be a bummer for Spaceweather.com.
Don't count out sunspots just yet, however. While the data of Livingston and Penn are widely thought to be correct, far-reaching extrapolations may be premature. This type of measurement is relatively new, and the data reaches back less than 17 years. "Whether this is an omen of long-term sunspot decline, analogous to the Maunder Minimum, remains to be seen," they caution in a recent EOS article.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/02/livingston-and-penn-paper-sunspots-may-vanish-by-2015/



http://climatedepot.com/a/2452/Astronomers-Suns-output-may-decline-significantly-inducing-another-little-ice-age-on-the-Earth

Thrill

There have been three sunspots during this month, 1025 appeared at the start of September but faded away after about 24 hours. Recently, and for the first time in more than a year, two sunspots (1026 and 1027) were on the face of the sun at the same time. 1027 is still active.

---

http://spaceweather.com/

COSMIC RAYS HIT SPACE AGE HIGH: NASA spacecraft are measuring record-high levels of cosmic rays--a side-effect of the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century. This development could have implications for the amount of shielding astronauts need to take when they explore deep space.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/29sep_cosmicrays.htm

[font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]"In 2009, cosmic ray intensities have increased 19% beyond anything we've seen in the past 50 years," says Richard Mewaldt of Caltech. "The increase is significant, and it could mean we need to re-think how much radiation shielding astronauts take with them on deep-space missions."[/font]

[font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The cause of the surge is solar minimum, a deep lull in solar activity that began around 2007 and continues today. Researchers have long known that cosmic rays go up when solar activity goes down. Right now solar activity is as weak as it has been in modern times, setting the stage for what Mewaldt calls "a perfect storm of cosmic rays."[/font]

.............

[font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Earth is in no great peril. Our planet's atmosphere and magnetic field provide some defense against the extra cosmic rays. Indeed, we've experienced much worse in the past. Hundreds of years ago, cosmic ray fluxes were at least 200% to 300% higher than anything measured during the Space Age. Researchers know this because when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere, they produce an isotope of beryllium, 10Be, which is preserved in polar ice. By examining ice cores, it is possible to estimate cosmic ray fluxes more than a thousand years into the past. Even with the recent surge, cosmic rays today are much weaker than they have been at times in the past millennium.

[/font][font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]"The space era has so far experienced a time of relatively low cosmic ray activity," says Mewaldt. "We may now be returning to levels typical of past centuries."[/font]

Mozart1986

Thrill wrote: »

Are sunspots on the way out? According to a study by Bill Livingston and Matt Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, they will disappear altogether in by 2015.




http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/02/livingston-and-penn-paper-sunspots-may-vanish-by-2015/



http://climatedepot.com/a/2452/Astronomers-Suns-output-may-decline-significantly-inducing-another-little-ice-age-on-the-Earth

Bill Livingston got a measurement on sunspot 1027 and it's just below 2000 gauss which is right on target for his predictions. If this continues, the sunspots will disappear by 2015. But this must be part of a bigger cycle and sooner or later the gauss will begin to recover. The only question is when and what effect could it have on the Earths climate?

Thrill

Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "Solar Max has arrived."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ha7X6dWVQE

"Solar Maximum is here …. Finally." According to an analysis Bieseker presented at NOAA's Space Weather Workshop in April, the sunspot number for Solar Cycle 24 is near its peak right now.

They agree on another point, too: It is not very impressive.


"This solar cycle continues to rank among the weakest on record," comments Ron Turner of Analytic Services, Inc. who serves as a Senior Science Advisor to NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program. To illustrate the point, he plotted the smoothed sunspot number of Cycle 24 vs. the previous 23 cycles since 1755. "In the historical record, there are only a few Solar Maxima weaker than this one."

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/10jun_solarminimax/

Thrill

The Sun goes blank. Solar max has brought the first spotless day in nearly three years.

Solar activity is very low. July 17th brought the first spotless day in nearly three years. The face of the sun was completely blank and the sunspot number dropped to zero. Now, however, two small sunspots are emerging, circled in this image from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

Neither of these small spots has the kind of complex magnetic field that harbors energy for strong flares. The quiet is therefore expected to continue through the weekend.


Before July 17, 2014, the previous spotless day was August 14, 2011, a gap of nearly 3 years. What happened then provides context for what is happening today. Overall, 2011 was a year of relatively high solar activity with multiple X-flares; the spotless sun was just a temporary intermission. 2014 will probably be remembered the same way. As new sunspots emerge and grow, the Solar Max of 2014 will pick up where it left off a couple weeks ago when sunspots were abundant. However, because no one can predict the solar cycle, this "All Quiet Event" is worth monitoring.

http://behindtheblack.com/tag/blank-sun/


Large image

http://www.spaceweather.com/images2014/18jul14/hmi1898.gif?PHPSESSID=1lnk1hiahulksigom8v8rd6j45




.

Thrill

The sun is blank today as the weakest cycle in almost 200 years could be coming to an end.

The last blank day occurred on July 17 2014. (see above post)

This is a sign that Solar Cycle 24 is waning and that a new Solar Minimum is on the way. The last time the solar cycle bottomed out in 2008-2009, spotless days were commonplace. Whole months passed without a single sunspot, and solar flares became rare.

The spotless state of today's sun, however, is probably just temporary. Underneath the visible surface of the sun, the solar dynamo is still churning out knots of magnetism that will soon bob to the surface to make new sunspots. Solar Cycle 24 is not quite finished. It is, however, coming to an end.

Forecasters expect the next solar minimum to arrive in 2019-2020. Between now and then, there will be lots of spotless suns. At first, the blank stretches will be measured in days; later in weeks and months

http://www.spaceweather.com/

.