IS SOLAR CYCLE 24 GOING ROUGE?

What is going on with Solar Cycle 24?   It began with a whisper and until recently,  it continued that way. It peaked at international sunspot number(ISN) of 66.9 in February 2012 and many thought that would be the high for Solar Cycle 24. But wait, a second peak formed and the question is, when will it stop growing?   Best guesses say that the peak will be somewhere around 80 (ISN). NASA says: “Many cycles are double peaked but this is the first in which the second peak in sunspot number was larger than the first.”

Solar Cycle 24 does rank as one of the weakest cycle in the past 110 years. See the chart below from Climate Change Sanity:

Further, Solar Cycle 24 is still well below its predecessor, Solar Cycle 23 as can be seen in the chart below. (Click on Charts to enlarge.)

Chart courtsey of:   solen.info.solar/

Jan Alvestad, the creator of the chart, is projecting the peak ISN to be less than 80—see the green line.

So far in April, the highest daily peak was been nearly 150.   See the SILSO chart below:

SILSO’s 2014 Solar Cycle 24 ISN sunspot projection for 2014 is shown below:

They use two methods for making their projections. The methods are briefly described here and here.  But one method exceeds 80 and one nears but not reach 80.

When a Solar Cycle is at the “maximum” that is the time it will have a maximum of sunspots. So far that is what 24 is doing and even at an ISN of 80 it will be the least active since Solar Cycle 16 that began in August, 1923 and lasted until September, 1933.

cbdakota