Articles Tagged "Solar Cycle 25"

Frank Hill: Future sunspot drop, but no new ice age.

Frank Hill is an astronomer at the U.S. National Solar Observatory. Last summer (June, 2011) Hill and colleagues announced their conclusions that sunspot activity might be headed for a dramatic drop in activity, beginning around the year 2019. The sun normally follows a cycle of activity lasting about 11 years. The current cycle, Cycle 24, is now heading towards its peak. Frank Hill and colleagues are looking toward the next cycle — Cycle 25. Based on data showing decades-long trends, they are suggesting its peak might be delayed or that it might not have a typical peak in activity at all. Hill spoke more about the recent sunspot study with EarthSky’s Jorge Salazar.

Frank Hill told EarthSky that — while his team did suggest a drop in solar activity beginning around 2019 — they did not suggest Earth would cool as a result.

Are you familiar with media reports that have gotten this story wrong?

Yes, actually. It seems to me that a lot of reports have come out and said that we have predicted a new ice age. That is making the leap from low sunspot activity to cooling. We did not predict a little ice age.

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 of Solar Cycle 25 amplitude:

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/10may_longrange/

Based on the slowing of the Sun’s “Great Conveyor Belt”, he predicted that

“The slowdown we see now means that Solar Cycle 25, peaking around the year 2022, could be one of the weakest in centuries.”
He is very likely to have got the year wrong in that Solar Cycle 25 is unlikely to start until 2025.

In this paper: http://www.probeinternational.org/Livingston-penn-2010.pdf,

Livingston and Penn provided the first hard estimate of Solar Cycle 25 amplitude based on a physical model. That estimate is 7, which would make it the smallest solar cycle for over 300 years.

Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.

.....There has been quite a bit of news about a predicted grand minima in solar activity. We recently reported on a conference where three lines of evidence were presented, seeming to point to a future disappearance of sunspots, perhaps like the dreaded Maunder Minimum. I am not unbiased in this regard, and like most radio amateurs, yearn for high solar activity. Alas, a return of Solar Cycle 19, the granddaddy of them all, seems elusive. But there is some dissent regarding these predictions of no sunspots, which gives us hope.

On Wednesday, I spoke with Dr. Douglas Biesecker, an astrophysicist at the NOAA Space Environment Center in Boulder. He was mentioned in the Solar Update for June 17, dissenting from the assertion that evidence points toward sunspots disappearing or another Maunder Minimum in our future.

He mentioned something called a Gleissberg Cycle. When we do a really long smoothing of sunspot numbers, the smoothed sunspot numbers we are familiar with -- the data used in those nice graphs of sunspot cycles -- average data over 13 months. So every place you look on the graph doesn’t show the variation that occurred during that month, but instead averages data over more than a year, to smooth out all the noise of daily variations. But what would happen if you smoothed the numbers over a much longer period, say 11 years? Could you find some periodicity that would suggest a cycle of cycles or perhaps predict clusters of decades with low or high solar activity?

Gleissberg cycles suggest a periodicity of about 87 years, and some have studied these to try to predict general levels of solar activity over multiple decades. But if a cycle is 87 years long -- and we only have about 256 years of directly observed solar data -- the most we could look at would be less than three cycles. That isn’t enough data to make even crude speculative projections.

Sun’s coming quietude burns global warmists.

Reports of imminent climatic catastrophes are turning out to be rather anticlimactic. That’s because rather than heating up to life-threatening levels, new scientific findings indicate it’s more likely the Earth will cool in coming years. That’s bad news for a global-warming industry heavily invested in a sultry forecast.

Cornelis de Jager, a solar physicist from the Netherlands and former secretary-general of the International Astronomical Union, announced that the sun is about to enter a period of extremely low sunspot activity, which historically is associated with cooling trends. Backed by other scientists, he predicted the “grand solar minimum” is expected to begin around 2020 and last until 2100.

The ebb of solar activity is shaping up to resemble what occurred during the Little Ice Age, the period from 1620 to 1720 when sunspot activity diminished and temperatures dropped an estimated 3 degrees Celsius. The era was noted for colder-than-usual winters in North America and Europe, when rivers and canals froze over, allowing for ice-skating and winter festivals. It also resulted in crop failure and population displacement in northern regions such as Iceland. To characterize the impending grand solar minimum as an “ice age” - with glaciers forming at temperate latitudes - would be an exaggeration. The correlation between decreased sunspot activity and falling temperatures means it’s likely to get colder when the sunspots begin to disappear.