Two Sunspots From Solar Cycle-25

Spaceweather.com has the details HERE.

Solar Cycle 25 really is coming. Today, for the first time, there are two new-cycle sunspots on the solar disk–one in each hemisphere. This map of solar magnetic fields from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory shows their location:

We know these sunspots belong to the next solar cycle because of their magnetic polarity. Simply put, they are backwards. According to Hale’s Law, sunspot polarities flip-flop from one solar cycle to the next. During old Solar Cycle 24, we grew accustomed to sunspots in the sun’s southern hemisphere having a -/+ pattern. However, look at today’s southern sunspot:

It is the opposite: +/-. This identifies it as a member of new Solar Cycle 25.

Likewise, today’s northern sunspot has a reversed polarity compared to northern spots from old Solar Cycle 24. It, too, therefore, belongs to Solar Cycle 25.

The sun is currently in Solar Minimum–the nadir of the 11-year sunspot cycle. It’s a deep Minimum, century-class according to sunspot counts. The scarcity of sunspots has been so remarkable that it has prompted discussion of a possible “extended Minimum” akin to the Maunder Minimum of the 17th century when sunspots were absent for decades. Such an event could have implications for terrestrial climate.

Today’s new-cycle sunspots (along with isolatednew-cycle spots earlier this year) suggest that the solar cycle is, in fact, unfolding normally. A new Maunder Minimum does not appear to be in the offing. Forecasters expect Solar Cycle 25 to slowly gain strength in the years ahead and reach a peak in July 2025.

Your thoughts.  The Maunder Minimum was not observed with the technology available today, small spots like these could have been missed. What do you think?

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How the sun affects temperatures on Earth (w/ Valentina Zharkova, Northumbria University)

Conversations That Matter, with Stuart McNish

The sun is going through a stage known as a solar or Maunder Minimum.’This is where the solar activity that ignites solar flares or sun spots has decreased. It’s a normal cycle and one that has been linked to the mini ice age that lasted more than 50 years starting in the mid-1600s.

According to space weather since 2015, the number of days without a recordable sun spot has been rising year over year. NOAA, NASA and others all appear to agree the sun is entering a solar minimum phase.

What it means is open to interpretation because as Professor William Happer pointed out when I asked him about the growing number of people and agencies that suggest a solar minimum could lead to a cooling off period, he directed me the Danish proverb: “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”

It has been suggested that mathematics can establish patterns and back them up with empirical evidence to support a prediction. We reached out to Professor of Mathematics Valentina Zharkova of Northumbria University, one of the first people to raise awareness of the decrease in solar activity, for a Conversation That Matters about the sun, its reduced activity and her reading of the impact it will have on temperatures on earth.

My bets are with Dr. Zharkova, we will have a Maunder light Grand Minimum in the next 30 years. Your thoughts in the comments.

NOAA/NASA Panel Concurs that Solar Cycle 25 will Peak in July 2025

12/11/2019

 

The NOAA/NASA-co-chaired international Solar Cycle Prediction Panel has released its latest forecast for to forecast Solar Cycle 25. The panel’s consensus calls for a peak in July 2025 (±8 months), with a smoothed sunspot number of 115. The panel agreed that Cycle 25 will be of average intensity and similar to Cycle 24. The panel additionally concurred that the solar minimum between Cycles 24 and 25 will occur in April 2020 (±6 months). If the solar minimum prediction is correct, this would make Solar Cycle 24 the seventh longest on record at 11.4 years. In its preliminary forecast released last April, the scientists on the panel forecast that Solar Cycle 25 would likely be weak, much like the current Cycle 24.

“Solar Cycle 25 may have a slow start, but is anticipated to peak with solar maximum occurring between 2023 and 2026, and a sunspot range of 95 to 130. This is well below the average number of sunspots,” the panel said last spring, adding with “high confidence” that Cycle 25 “should break the trend of weakening solar activity seen over the past four cycles.” The panel said the expectation that Cycle 25 would be comparable in size to Cycle 24 suggests that the steady decline in solar cycle amplitude seen from Cycle 21 through Cycle 24 has ended and that there is no indication of an approaching “Maunder-type” minimum. Cycle 24 peaked in April 2014 with an average sunspot number of 82. [Emphasis Added]

The Solar Cycle Prediction Panel forecasts the number of sunspots expected for solar maximum, along with the timing of the peak and minimum solar activity levels for the cycle. It is comprised of scientists representing NOAA, NASA, the International Space Environment Services, and other US and international scientists.

Source: NOAA/NASAviaARRL

The Sun’s Role in Climate Change

Dr. Nir Shaviv spoke at a Friends of Science event on June 2, 2015, on Solar Forcing. Dr. Shaviv explained and demonstrated that the sun is an important climate driver but it is missing from the standard climate analyses. As a consequence, the standard (i.e. IPCC) models have a much higher climate sensitivity than the real Earth has, such that future climate response to anthropogenic forcing will be “much more benign” than what alarmists claim.

A video of his talk is here:  https://youtu.be/YtCEW2shDSU

Dr. Nir Shaviv’s slides can be downloaded HERE.  Grand Minimums are mentioned on slide 27.

 

The ‘New Normal’ Is Not What You Think

My Other Voices Column: The ‘new normal’ is not what you think was published this AM [11-16-19] in The Union.

https://www.theunion.com/opinion/columns/russell-steele-the-new-normal-is-not-what-you-think/

Cold October (and now November) in perspective

Reblogged from Icecap.us

See references to Maunder and Dalton Minimums.

By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM

Starting in January 2019, unusual and at times record cold has been locked in over the north central states.

Though there was heat in late summer in the southeast and eastern Gulf to the Mid-Atlantic, the cold held in the north central. After a very cold spring with late snows, which significantly delayed or prevented grain planting, a cool summer followed and gave way to a very early cold shot in late September that brought early deep freezes and even record snows in the north central leading to significant crop losses.

There have been 90 all-time record lows versus just 44 all-time record highs this year. That included the all time state record low of -38F in Mount Carroll in Illinois on January 31st.

The cold central deepened in October and pushed to the east bringing very early snow into the Midwest. October saw 3680 record daily lows, 32 all time record lows for the month and no all time record monthly highs (NOAA NCEI).

After bringing heavy snows to the Rockies and high plains the cold rolled south with temperatures 30 to 50 degrees below normal.

Temperatures dropped to a record of -35F at Logan County Sink in Utah and -46F in Peter’s sink, record coldest for the U.S. for the month of October.

The temperatures the first 9 months have tracked the last 120 years well with multidecadal cycles in the ocean.

The cold also follows the solar activity. We are currently in a century or more quiet sun.  In the period in and following the last 11 year cycle low (2007-2011), we had brutal cold and snow here in the U.S. and Europe.

December in 2010, the Central England Temperature (longest continuous record going back to 1659), was the second coldest December.  Snow, which was forecast to be a thing of the past, instead buried the UK for long periods reminiscent of the Dalton solar Minimum of the early 1800s as evidenced by Dicken’s novels.

In the US, record cold and snow in the Snowmageddon Mid-Atlantic winter of 2009/10, was eclipsed with the record winters of 2013/14 and 2014/15. Which brought the coldest and snowiest winter and modern day peaks of Great Lake ice.

The snow in the hemisphere is increasing very rapidly and is above normal, which should expand and enhance the cold. Note how the fall record for snow extent was at record levels last fall.

Given the projection by Russian scientists and many in the west including some at NASA, we could be heading into a deep and long solar minimum like the Maunder Minimum with a major cooling. Whether it is a several decade Dalton like period or a Maunder, this is no time to abandon cheap, available energy.

Even in the warmer interlude we have enjoyed, cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, according to an international study analyzing over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries.

Link

Next Maunder Minimum Predicted

Reposted from Watt’s Up With That

25 for 25

Guest post by David Archibald

Back on March 7, 2006, the National Science Foundation issued a press release predicting that the amplitude of Solar Cycle 24 would be “30 to 50 percent stronger” than Solar Cycle 23. Solar Cycle 23 had a smoothed maximum amplitude of 180.3. The press release described the forecast as “unprecedented”. Perhaps it was as in unprecedentedly wrong. Solar Cycle 24 had a smoothed maximum amplitude of 116.4 in April 2104, which made it 35% weaker than Solar Cycle 23.

NASA has recycled some of the language from that 2006 press release in this release on NASA researcher Irina Kitiashvili’s forecast of Solar Cycle 25 amplitude which includes this line:

The maximum of this next cycle – measured in terms of sunspot number, a standard measure of solar activity level – could be 30 to 50% lower than the most recent one.

This time it is 30 to 50% lower rather than higher which would put maximum smoothed amplitude in the range of 80 to 60. The graphics in Kitiashvili’s presentation differ from that. This graphic from slide nine has a peak amplitude of 50 with a range of 65 down to 40:

Figure 1: Solar Cycle 25 forecast in the context of 320 years of solar cycle data

But the graphic on the previous slide has a peak amplitude of 25:

Figure 2: Solar Cycle 25 amplitude forecast from slide 8

Let’s assume that the latter forecast of 25 is the author’s intent and apply it to the figure on slide 3 of 420 years of sunspot data:

Figure 3: Forecast from Figure 2 imposed on the 420 years of solar cycle data on slide 3.

In this figure the forecast from Figure 2 is scaled to fit on the graphic on slide 3 from Kitiashvili’s presentation. It shows that Solar Cycle 25 will be the smallest for some 300 years. The activity pattern predicted by Kitiashvili looks like the setup for the Maunder Minimum. A Maunder-like event was predicted by Schatten and Tobiska in their paper to the 34^th meeting of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society, June 2003:

“The surprising result of these long range predictions is a rapid decline in solar activity, starting with cycle #24. If this trend continues, we may see the Sun heading towards a “Maunder” type of solar activity minimum – an extensive period of reduced levels of solar activity.”

NASA’s press release is headed “Solar Activity Forecast for Next Decade Favorable for Exploration”. So spacecraft electronics and spacemen will have a lower chance of being fried by solar storms, the Earth’s thermosphere will shrink, satellites will have lower drag and stay in orbit longer. But what about life on Earth? In her 2011 paper Haigh showed an unequivocal relationship between solar activity and climate as recorded in North Atlantic ocean sediments:

Figure 4: Records extracted from ocean sediments in the North Atlantic

In Figure 4 solar activity is measured by Be¹⁰ (purple) and climate variation is shown by deposits of ice-rafted minerals (orange). Lower solar activity means that it will become colder and colder is drier. Prepare accordingly.

David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare.

[Emphasis added]

A Repeat of the Dalton Solar Minimum?

It is well known that cold and warm periods of the climate are correlated with intensive solar activity (e.g., the Medieval Warm Period), while decreases in temperature occur during periods of low solar activity (e.g., the Little Ice Age; Lean and Rind, 1999; Bond et al., 2001).

Long cold periods from 1643 to 1667 and from 1675 to 1690 that were revealed for another territory (Lyu et al., 2016; Wilson et al., 2016) coincided with the Maunder Minimum (1645–1715), an interval of decreased solar irradiance (Bard et al., 2000). The coldest year in this study (1662) was revealed in this period too. 

Source HERE.

Will Thames Freeze Again? UK Vulnerable to Cooling Catastrophe

By Vijay Jayaraj writing at CNSNews.com

[. . . ]

Studies suggest that the previous lows in solar activity—solar cycles 5 and 6 during the Dalton Minimum (1790–1830)—coincided with the Little Ice Age that disrupted the entire Northern Hemisphere. It was during this time that London’s River Thames (not far from the Parliament) froze, and agriculture in Britain and elsewhere came to a standstill.

According to recent research papers by scientists, the two coming solar cycles—25 and 26—will display much lower solar activity than the solar cycles of the Little Ice Age, with a potential period of cooling, as NASA suggests.

“The solar cycle 25 will start in the year 2021 (January) and will last till 2031 (February), while the solar cycle 26 will start in the year 2031 (March) and will last till the year 2041 (February),” said the report.
The scientists concluded, “We have also compared the activities of solar cycles 5 and 6 (Dalton minima periods) to solar cycles 25 and 26 and have observed that the other solar minimum is underway.”

Such a period could demolish the UK’s agricultural sector. It would also negatively affect agriculture in the rest of the world. There could be a complete lockdown of agriculture and a severe proven stress on the energy sector, including electricity generation, not just in Britain but throughout the Northern Hemisphere.

Warnings about the on-going solar minima should not be ignored. Yet the climate crisis movement, focusing exclusively on warming as a threat, promotes a lack of awareness of this threat.

The full article is HERE.

Plasma flow near the sun’s surface explains sunspots, other solar phenomena

Understanding the previously mysterious properties of the sun.

 

AMIT MALEWAR    Details at the TechExplorist:

Every 11 years or so, the Sun’s magnetic field completely flips. This means that the Sun’s north and south poles switch places. Then it takes about another 11 years for the Sun’s north and south poles to flip back again.

The solar cycle affects activity on the surface of the Sun, such as sunspots which are caused by the Sun’s magnetic fields. Until now, various theories have tracked sunspots, but unable to explain why the number of spots peaks every 11 years.

In an effort to understand it, scientists at the University of Washington have proposed a model of plasma motion to explain the 11-year sunspot cycle and several other previously mysterious properties of the Sun.

Scientists created this model by relying on their previous work with fusion energy research. The model demonstrates that a slight layer underneath the Sun’s surface is key to many highlights we see from Earth, such as sunspots, magnetic reversals, and solar flow.

The fusion reactor uses very high temperatures similar to those inside the Sun to separate hydrogen nuclei from their electrons. In both the Sun and in fusion reactors, the nuclei of two hydrogen atoms fuse, releasing vast amounts of energy.

The type of reactor scientists have focused on; a spheromak contains the electron plasma within a sphere that causes it to self-organize into specific patterns. When they began to consider the Sun, they observed similarities and created a model for what might be happening in the celestial body.

First author Thomas Jarboe, a UW professor of aeronautics and astronautics, said, “Our model is completely different from a normal picture of the Sun. I think we’re the first people that are telling you the nature and source of solar magnetic phenomena—how the Sun works.”

In the new model, a thin layer of magnetic flux and plasma, or floating electrons, moves at different speeds on a different part of the Sun. The distinction in speed between the flows makes bits of magnetism, known as magnetic helicity, that are similar to what happens in some fusion reactor concepts.

Jarboe said, “Every 11 years, the Sun grows this layer until it’s too big to be stable, and then it sloughs off. Its departure exposes the lower layer of plasma moving in the opposite direction with a flipped magnetic field.”

“When the circuits in both hemispheres are moving at the same speed, more sunspots appear. When the circuits are different speeds, there is less sunspot activity. That mismatch may have happened during the decades of little sunspot activity known as the “Maunder Minimum.”

“If the two hemispheres rotate at different speeds, then the sunspots near the equator won’t match up, and the whole thing will die.”

“Scientists had thought that a sunspot was generated down at 30 percent of the depth of the Sun, and then came up in a twisted rope of plasma that pops out. Instead, his model shows that the sunspots are in the “supergranules” that form within the thin, subsurface layer of plasma that the study calculates to be roughly 100 to 300 miles (150 to 450 kilometers) thick, or a fraction of the Sun’s 430,000-mile radius.”

“The sunspot is an amazing thing. There’s nothing there, and then all of a sudden, you see it in a flash.”

“Other properties explained by the theory include flow inside the Sun, the twisting action that leads to sunspots and the entire magnetic structure of the Sun. The paper is likely to provoke intense discussion.”  [Emphasis added]

“I hope that scientists will look at their data in a new light, and the researchers who worked their whole lives to gather that data will have a new tool to understand what it all means.”

The study describing the model is published in the journal Physics of Plasmas

Another link to the paper:  https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5087613

Question:  How does this model fit with Professor Valentina Zharkova model of the sun with four plasma layers?  I may have to find the time to re-read the Professors paper and compare. If a reader gets the paper read before I do please post your analysis in the comments. Thanks.