Solar Cycle 25 Blog

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 of us who wish to predict climate, the most important solar cycle attribute is solar cycle length. Most of the curve-fitting exercises such as NASA’s place the next minimum between 2020 and 2022 (eg: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/06/nasas-november-solar-prediction/). Solar minimum in December 2022 would make Solar Cycle 24 fourteen years long, which in turn would make the climate of the mid-latitudes over Solar Cycle 25 about 1.0°C colder than the climate over Solar Cycle 24.

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ISBN 978-1-4614-0570-2

Provides a detailed introduction to the dynamics of the Sun and how it affects Earth, both physically and culturally

The layouts and visuals in the book are truly stunning and the book includes a number of images never published before
Contains additional information and a large number of animations to go on SpringerExtras

The center of our Solar System is a star, one among billions of stars in our own galaxy. This star, which we call the Sun, gives rise to all life on Earth, is the driver of the photosynthesis in plants, and is the source of all food, energy, and fossil fuels on Earth.

For us humans, the Sun as seen with the naked eye appears as a static and quiet yellow disk in the sky. However, it is in fact a stormy and variable star and contributes much more than only light and heat. It is the source of the beautiful northern and southern lights and can affect our technology-based society in many ways.

The Sun is, like astronomy in general, a good entrance to natural science, since it affects us in so many ways and connects us to many other fields of science, such as physics, chemistry, biology, and meteorology.

On Dec. 31st, a wave of ionization swept through the high atmosphere over Europe when sunspot AR1389 unleashed another M2-class solar flare. "There was a very clear sudden ionospheric disturbance on my VLF radio instruments," reports Rob Stammes, who sends these data from the Polar Light Center in Lofoten, Norway:

"The sun is below the horizon where we are located north of the Arctic Circle," says Stammes. "This event shows we still have some contact with the sun."

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Solar particles interact with Earth's magnetosphere. (Source: NASA)

No surprise here. Just more inconvenient results for CO2 broken-record dogmatists

New paper: GISS temps and solar activity

A recent paper published by the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar Terrestial Physics (74) 2012 87-93 and authored by Souza Echer et al. suggests that solar cycles, to a substantial extent, drive global temperatures, and that likely through amplification mechanisms.

The paper is titled: On the relationship between global, hemispheric and latitudinal averaged air surface temperature (GISS time series) and solar activity.

The authors decomposed average air surface temperature series obtained from GISS and sunspot number (Rz) from 1880 – 2005 to see if a correlation could be found. They performed a cross correlation analysis between band-passed filtered data around 11-year and 22 years.

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The current prediction for Sunspot Cycle 24 gives a smoothed sunspot number maximum of about 99 in February of 2013. We are currently about three years into Cycle 24. Increased activity in the last few months has raised the predicted maximum and moved it earlier in 2013. The current predicted size still make this the smallest sunspot cycle in over 80 years.

Predicting the behavior of a sunspot cycle is fairly reliable once the cycle is well underway (about 3 years after the minimum in sunspot number occurs.

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After five years of surprising quiet, the sun roared to life in 2011.

Our star erupted with numerous strong flares and waves of charged particles. Many researchers predict the surge will culminate in a peak in the sun's 11-year activity cycle in 2013.

This year also marked several key advances in scientists' understanding of the dynamics driving our favorite star. Here are some of the solar highlights of 2011:

Solar flares and CMEs

Having been relatively quiet since 2005, the sun spouted off a number of powerful flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) this year.

CMEs are made up of massive clouds of plasma that are sent streaking through space in any direction at several million mph. When these clouds are aimed at Earth, they can spawn geomagnetic storms that wreak havoc with GPS signals, radio communications and power grids

Click source to read FULL report from Nola Taylor Redd

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WHEN Siberian conditions hit Britain this time last year everyone was caught out, including the weathermen.

Global warming, we had been told, meant the snowy conditions we remember from our childhoods would be just that: memories.

But following the bitter cold of the past two winters those predictions are beginning to look rather wide of the mark. now a new book, Frozen Britain by meteorologists Ian McCaskill and Paul Hudson, suggests that rather than facing milder winters we could be in for some more Arctic big freezes.

Certainly, despite everything that the global-warming lobby has suggested, our climate may be dictated by more than just man- made toxins pumped into the atmosphere. One of the key indicators – which has fallen out of favour with the computer-obsessed meteorologists of today – is the sun.

According to McCaskill and Hudson the clues to our future weather may lie with the sun.

“In the past few years it has been behaving very oddly,” Hudson says.

In the past, when there have been periods of relative inactivity on the surface of the sun they have been followed by years of cold winters.

Research published recently showed that in the early 1800s when activity on the sun was remarkably low for many years there was a dramatic change in the weather.

Difference in winter surface climate for solar minimum minus solar maximum.

The impact of solar irradiance variations on Earth’s surface climate has been debated by many in the past. Based on correlations between solar variability and meteorological changes, the Sun-climate link seems obvious but, as is often stated, correlation does not prove causation. Previously, any link was disputed because the amount of energy delivered by the Sun was deemed too small to have a significant impact. New satellite measurements indicate that variations in solar ultraviolet irradiance may be larger than previously thought, forcing a reevaluation of the impact of solar variation. A recent report in the journal Nature Geoscience claims to show just that—a link between the 11 year solar cycle and Northern Hemisphere winters.

Using older measurements of solar variability over the 11 year solar cycle as input, climate models have proven incapable of establishing linkage between insolation and climate. Still, there have been tantalizing reports of such linkage in the past (see “The Sun's Hidden Power”). In a report in the August 28, 2009, issue of the journal Science entitled “Amplifying the Pacific Climate System Response to a Small 11-Year Solar Cycle Forcing,” Gerald A. Meehl et al. described a possible mechanism that could explain how seemingly small changes in solar output can have a big impact on Earth's climate. Their work explained how the upper atmosphere can act as a solar heat amplifier when UV radiation from the Sun increases.

Now, new, more accurate measurements taken by satellites have revised the amount of variability in insolation, particularly in the ultraviolet frequencies. In “Solar forcing of winter climate variability in the Northern Hemisphere,” Sarah Ineson et al. have applied these new data to a revised climate model and report positive linkage between insolation variability and climate. The researchers explain the importance of the new satellite data.

The IPCC has claimed in IPCC AR-4, Chapter 9, Executive Summary, that “Greenhouse gas forcing has very likely caused most of the observed global warming over the last 50 years.” This appears to be incorrect because R2 including the influence of CO2 is not significantly different from R2 assuming CO2 has no influence.

All those organizations that agree with the Climate Science Community ‘Consensus’ had accepted what the Consensus claimed because they assumed that these Climate Scientists were the experts and had figured it out. In fact, the Consensus had not ‘figured it out’. They did not identify a cause and instead assumed that it must be atmospheric CO2 because they couldn’t think of anything else. This was reinforced by the observation that CO2 and average global temperature increased together from 1973 to 2005 (or at least for the 22 years from 1976 to 1998).

However, while CO2 has continued to rise, the temperature has stopped rising. From 2001 through September, 2011 the atmospheric CO2 increased by 23.6% of the total increase from 1800 to 2001 while the average global temperature has not increased. The 23.6% CO2 increase is the significant measurement, not the comparatively brief time period.

Click source to download "Verification of Natural Climate Change" by Dan Pangburn

A relatively quiet stretch for the sun in recent years does not necessarily herald an impending solar activity low of historic proportions, a new study reports.

The sun was quiescent from 2005 to 2010, spouting off relatively few flares and eruptions of solar plasma known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). That dry spell lasted about twice as long as usual, prompting some scientists to predict that a "grand minimum" of solar activity — the likes of which hasn't been seen in 300 years — could be on the way.

But the opposite could just as easily be true, the study suggests.

"[A]fter looking at data of past solar activity, we have pointed out that it is just as likely that the sun will go into a grand maximum again (it just came out of one) than into a grand minimum," said study lead author Sami Solanki, of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPISSR) in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany.