Category Archives: Sun

November 2015 Solar Cycle 24 Update

Posted on December 6, 2015 | 1 comment

Solar Cycle 24 activity has peaked and it is trending down to minimal Sunspot numbers. As most Solar Cycles are nominally 11 years in length, one might guess that December 2019 would be the end of Cycle 24 and the start of Solar Cycle 25. hotsunimagesBut don’t bet too much money on that date. Eleven years is 132 months. But Cycle 23 was not completed until 149 months after it began. The chart (courtesy of Solen.info) below shows the current state of Cycle 24:

solartressactive6dec15

Looking at the Solar Cycle 24 progress chart (courtesy of Solen.info) below one can see that the South Polar Field (green line) has been the source of most of the Sunspot activity the past year or so.   And it has really taken a tumble since midyear.

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Posted in Climate Alarmism, Solar Activity, Solar Cycle 24, Solar Cycle 25, Solar Flux, Sun, sun and climate

Little Ice Age By 2030?

Posted on July 25, 2015 | Leave a comment

Professor Valentian Zharkova of Northumbria University presented her results Cold-Weather-Cartoonfor a new model of the Sun’s interior dynamo to the Royal Astronomical Society. Zharkova and her team believe they have made a discovery that allows them to predict solar activity. From the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting 2015 – report 4” posting:

“We found magnetic wave components appearing in pairs; originating in two different layers in the Sun’s interior. They both have a frequency of approximately 11 years, although this frequency is slightly different [for both] and they are offset in time,” says Zharkova. The two magnetic waves either reinforce one another to produce high activity or cancel out to create lull periods.

The model predicts that the magnetic wave pairs will become increasingly offset during Cycle 25, which peaks in 2022. Then during Cycle 26, which covers the decade from 2030-2040, the two waves will become exactly out of synch, cancelling one another out. This will cause a significant reduction in solar activity. “In cycle 26, the two waves exactly mirror each other, peaking at the same time but in opposite hemispheres of the Sun. We predict that this will lead to the properties of a ‘Maunder minimum’,” says Zharkova”

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Posted in AGW, Environment, Galaxies, Global Temperatures, Interglacial periods, Solar Activity, Solar Cycle 24, Solar Cycle 25, Sun, sun and climate, Sunspots

New Solar Cycle Charts Now Reflect The Revised Sunspot Counting System.

Posted on July 5, 2015 | 2 comments

bigspotfd_thumbRevised Sunspot number as discussed in previous posting of July 2015 numbers can be seen below:new #solarterrestialjuly

Below is the Sunspot number posted before the numbering was changed to match the new criteria discussed in the “Sunspot Number History Change Is Underway“.

solarterrestrialjuly1-2015

The only thing different is the green line the “30 day Wolf Number. The new number is greater than the old one.

Quoting SILSO: “In the values themselves, the most prominent change will result from the elimination of the 0.6 factor formerly used by the Zürich Observatory to scale the modern numbers down to the scale of the initial Wolf observations. This factor has always led to some confusion and now has lost its sense more than 130 years after Wolf’s observations. This change will thus raise the scale of the entire sunspot number time series by a factor 1/O.6, which may significantly affect software using the sunspot number as input.”

cbdakota

 

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Posted in AGW, Solar Activity, Solar Cycle 24, Sun, Sunspots

Solar Cycle 24: June 2015 Update

Posted on July 1, 2015 | Leave a comment

How Cycle 24 June Sunspot plot will look when the new Sunspot numbering system is used is not yet clear. Using the “old Wolf system” that is the sun-womanInternational Smoothed Sunspot number basis, it would be expressed as 57.2 thirty day average versus last months number of 58.8.   The number for June 2015 is estimated to be 46.9 when the smoothing process is employed. What ever the measuring system, Cycle 24 is still heading downward to a minimum.

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Posted in AGW, Environment, Global Temperatures, IPCC, Solar Cycle 24, Solar System, Sun, sun and climate

Sunspot Number History Change Is Underway

Posted on June 24, 2015 | 5 comments

For those readers of this blog that follow the monthly update of Solar Cycle 24, things are about to change. For the better I think, but until the final report is 400yrsofsunspotcyclesUnknownreleased, we wont know for sure. Sunspot Index and Long-term Solar Observations (SILSO) a part of the World Data Center has issued a Sunspot Bulletin that says:”

                                           Warning of Major Data Change

Over the past 4 years a community effort has been carried out to revise entirely the historical sunspot number series. A good overview of the analyses and identified corrections is provided in the recent review paper: Clette, F., Svalgaard, L., Vaquero, J.M., Cliver, E. W.,”Revisiting the Sunspot Number. A 400-Year Perspective on the Solar Cycle”, Space Science Reviews, Volume 186, Issue 1-4, pp. 35-103.

Now that the new data series has been finalized, we are about to replace the original version of our sunspot data by an entirely new data set on July 1st. On this occasion, we decided to simultaneously introduce changes in several conventions in the data themselves and also in the distributed data files.

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Posted in AGW, CO2, Global Temperatures, IPCC, Solar Activity, Solar Cycle 24, Solar Cycle 25, Solar Flux, Sun, sun and climate, Sunspots

Green’s Say That Computer Projections Are Just Basic Physics- Ok, But They Only Use A Very Small Portion Of The Physics

Posted on May 30, 2015 | Leave a comment

Basic physics?   Far from it. The greens are trying to sell this. A recent posting on this site has a video in which Carol Andress of the  Environmental Defense Fund uses this line in a debate with Marc Morano.   Ms Andress seems particularly ill informed so she had to resort to this line of “Just Basic Physics”.

Doug Hoffman on his blog site, The Resilient Earth, had this so say about Basic Physics:”

It should come as no surprise that General Circulation Models (GCM), the basis for more comprehensive computer climate models, are based on differential equations, as are weather forecasting models and hurricane path prediction models. As we all know, weather forecasts are not very accurate, only giving a general idea of conditions a few days out, and hurricane models generally cannot predict the point of landfall until just before a storm comes ashore. But GCMs are different from weather programs even though they use some of the same equations. That is a refrain often repeated by supercilious climate modelers. It is true that climate models also include extra factors like sea ice models and “parametrization” for things like clouds. Unfortunately for them their models are not immune to the laws of computation that make their short term cousins grow more and more inaccurate over time.”

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Posted in AGW, Climate Alarmism, Climate Models, CO2, Environment, EPA, Hurricanes, IPCC, NGO's eg Greenpeace/WWF, Sea Ice, Storms/hurricanes, Sun, Tornados

Skeptic Reference Sources–Part 1

Posted on May 6, 2015 | 1 comment

There are several excellent sources for Skeptics. This posting provides a the sunsource for Solar Research Papers.   The amount of Sun based research may surprise you, because the Warmers continue to tell us that the Sun is not important.

Some of the research is readily available and some is behind paywalls. But I suspect that just looking at the available research will occupy you for some long time.   The source is Club du Soleil  Click here to see  this source.

There are several additional resources that I will post soon.

cbdakota

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Posted in AGW, CO2, Earth Magnetic Poles, Environment, IPCC, Radiation, Skeptic resources, Solar Cycle 24, Solar Cycle 25, Solar Flux, Sun, sun and climate, Sunspots

Solar Cycle 24 Activity Continues To Decline

Posted on May 6, 2015 | Leave a comment

The April 2015 Solar Cycle 24 Sunspot number rose somewhat in April, but the forecast is for a continued decline in activity.   The 2015 monthly Sunspot counts were: January = 67.0, February=44.8, March=38.4 and April=54.4.   The daily Sunspot counts seesawed, but definitely with a downward trend, Ri(black).  This can be seen be examining Rsouth (green). While Rnorth has been reasonably quiet for a year or so, Rsouth has been the major contributor to the total number since late 2013.

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Posted in AGW, Ap index, Solar Activity, Solar Cycle 24, Solar Flux, Sun, Sunspots

Bosse And Vahrenholt: Solar Cycle 24 Observations

Posted on April 30, 2015 | 1 comment

German scientist Frank Bosse and Fritz Vahrenholt, on 12 March,  bluesunUnknownprovided another way to look at Solar Cycle 24. It is worth sharing. They posted “The Sun In March 2015” on the Notrickszone.com website. They begin by saying:

“Last month our sun gave a really sluggish impression. The sunspot number (SSN) was only 38.4: only 46% of what is normal at this time into a cycle for all the cycles observed since 1750.

The following chart illustrates their assertion:

solarcycle24sspotsgermanmaerz1Fig. 1: The current solar cycle 24 compared to the mean of all previous cycles (blue) and to solar cycle no. 1, 1755-1766, (black).

solarcycle24ssanomalygerman Figure 2 Comparing the individual cycles to each other further confirms that the current cycle is a quiet one compared to those we saw in the second half of the last century.

(March was the 76th month since the start of Cycle 24. These numbers will change as the Cycle 24 progresses, but the low activity will likely to continue to result in under performing almost all of the previous Cycles. )

The posting discusses the Sun’s polar fields.  Click on the link above to see the entire posting.

{Vahrenholt is co-publiser of the highly regarded book “Die kalte Sonne: warum die Klimakatastrophe nicht stattfindet[6] (The Cold Sun: Why the Climate Crisis Isn’t Happening).}

cbdakota

 

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Posted in AGW, Solar Activity, Solar Cycle 24, Sun, sun and climate, Sunspots

Now For Something Entirely Different

Posted on April 14, 2015 | Leave a comment

VOX.com has a page with “40 maps that explain the universe”. Photos and drawing plus text are there for your review. Some of the illustrations are really eye catching. For example:

Even a single comet is pretty darn big

meteoronlaf0ba1pE.0

 

This is the comet 67P/C-G — which the Philae probe landed on in November 2014 — superimposed on Los Angeles. In terms of space, the comet is absolutely tiny: just 3.5 miles wide.

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Posted in Asteroids, comets, Earth from Space, End of the Earth, Mars, Solar Activity, Solar System, Sun, Watching the Night Sky