Sunspots Alive Alive Ho

This has been a long wait, but perhaps this is the beginning of the long awaited sunspot surge. It was getting a bit off putting to check in and see na-na. The activity should ramp up quite briskly now. The only question is if it will be overly active or not. Since most are predicting quiet, I may as well toss my mental coin and predict very active this time.

One unanswered question and possibly unanswerable question over sunspots has been the validity of the Maunder minimum that took place between 1645 and 1710. That took place while our observing technology was in it infancy and a period of mostly somewhat smaller spots could have been easily missed that could have been counted later. A lot of disquiet has been expressed over this issue over the years and should not be forgotten as many commentators are prone to do.

We are apparently getting a better sense of the sun’s magnetic field structure and perhaps we are closer to predictive ideas, which is interesting. This present cycle shows us though that right now we are still bystanders.

Anyway, it is good to see that group of sunspots show up to the party.

Jul 6, 2009 04:19 PM in

Sunspot activity ramping up out of deep slumber

By John Matson

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=sunspot-activity-ramping-up-out-of-2009-07-06&sc=DD_20090706

It wasn't quite fireworks, but the sun's activity, coming out of a long, deep lull, picked up a bit over the July 4th weekend. A group of sunspots, which mark intense magnetic activity, appeared in the past few days—a patch larger and more populous than any yet this year, according to data from the Space Weather Prediction Center. As we reported in April, this year got off to a slow start in terms of sunspots, which typically wax and wane in an 11-year cycle. The minimum of that cycle brought an exceptionally quiet 2008, one of the least active sunspot years of the century.Solar activity can have significant impacts in Earth's neighborhood, some 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) away. The so-called space weather that the sun stirs up can fry satellites, corrode pipelines and knock out electricity on massive scales. Joseph Gurman of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, U.S. project scientist for the sun-circling Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), characterized the current upwelling as "not unusual for this phase of the solar cycle," as the sun's activity begins to awaken. The region, Gurman says, has burbled with low-level flares, but "it hasn't given up anything huge yet." For an idea of what might happen the next time the sun does kick up something huge, see our August 2008 feature on solar superstorms and the communications infrastructure.

K7RA Solar Update

I thought it might be of interest to see a report on sunspot activity prepared for the Ham radio crowd who has a vested interest in knowing. The present low level of activity is sure to attract increasing press coverage that will be poorly informed as most of us must be when visiting such data for the first time.

We appear to be having a longer than average minimum but I somehow expect that to be over toward the fall. This is just an uninformed guess at the moment based on good old intuition. The interesting question will be how strong and if the climate recovers from the present cool spell in the next year.

It would be fun to get back to having a warming climate for everyone to get excited about, and to reenter the debate on the influence of sunspots. If what I just suggested actually happens, it will be just too good to be true.
The important thing here is that we have a continuing low flux of sunspots presently happening.

I also like to remind folks that during the Maunder minimum, such sunspots described here would have simply been invisible. Watching the cycles for the past decades, it becomes apparent that the driving system never shuts off and that the sunspots are a secondary effect of that driving system that is subject to minor fluctuation reflected in sunspot behavior.

The K7RA Solar Update

http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2009/03/06/10688/?nc=1

There have been no new sunspots since the recent brief three-day appearance of quickly fading sunspot 1013 on February 24-26. It was another Solar Cycle 24 sunspot, but this is not too encouraging, considering how brief and weak it appeared. There are no predictions for new sunspots, but these events tend to occur suddenly. Sunspot numbers for February 26-March 4 were 12, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 and 0 with a mean of 1.7. The 10.7 cm flux was 69.9, 68.9, 70.6, 69.4, 69.2, 69.1 and 69.7 with a mean of 69.5.The estimated planetary A indices were 2, 8, 5, 3, 2, 5 and 7 with a mean of 4.6. The estimated mid-latitude A indices were 2, 7, 4, 2, 0, 5 and 5 with a mean of 3.6.

This weekend is the ARRL International DX SSB Contest. We can assume conditions will include no sunspots and very stable geomagnetic conditions. NOAA and USAF predict planetary A index at 5 for March 6-12, and Geophysical Institute Prague predicts quiet conditions, March 6-12.

In this bulletin we have been tracking our own flavor of smoothed sunspot number, one based on a shorter period of data (three months instead of one year that the official smoothed sunspot graphs are based upon), and perhaps revealing trends earlier. But the trend goes down again. Now that February has passed, we can take sunspot data from December 1-February 28 to calculate a three month average, centered on January. The total daily sunspot numbers for that period was 208 -- divide that by 90 days and the result is 2.3.

Here are the numbers for the recent past, updated through last month:

Jan 07 22.7 Feb 07 18.5 Mar 07 11.2 Apr 07 12.2 May 07 15.8 Jun 07 18.7 Jul 07 15.4 Aug 07 10.2 Sep 07 5.4 Oct 07 3.0 Nov 07 6.9 Dec 07 8.1 Jan 08 8.5 Feb 08 8.4 Mar 08 8.4 Apr 08 8.9 May 08 5.0 Jun 08 3.7 Jul 08 2.0 Aug 08 1.1 Sep 08 2.5 Oct 08 4.5 Nov 08 4.4 Dec 08 3.7 Jan 09 2.3

Just as Solar Cycle 23 had a double-peak, we are perhaps observing a double bottom, centered on August 2008 and early 2009, or with the second minimum perhaps some time in the near future. We won't know it until it has passed, but it sure feels like a minimum at the moment.

The lack of sunspots has been gaining attention outside of the usual scientific amateur astronomer and Amateur Radio circles, and with so many people commenting on it who have no familiarity whatsoever with solar cycles and sunspots, we are bound to see poor judgment passed on as settled fact. For years, non-scientists (I am one, too) have occasionally attempted to correlate sunspot trends with everything from social unrest, cardboard box production and stock market averages, to climate and hem lengths, with no success -- or at least the conclusions were not reproducible.

About a year ago, some of us witnessed up close the resulting flap when a daily financial news organ grossly misquoted an astrophysicist, claiming he had predicted decades of few, if any, sunspots, accompanied by endless winter. Even though the scientist denied ever saying those things, the story seemed to develop a life of its own, a sort of social virus that spread widely very quickly, nearly impossible to correct.

As a long time fan of contemporary folklore, I thought it might be interesting to track this particular meme, so I used a popular search engine feature in which I registered a particular string (the word sunspot, in this case), and every day it sent me a summary of every new use of this word found on Web sites, in blogs, Usenet newsgroups and newspapers, along with links to these articles. One of the common mistakes I found involved the difference between number of sunspots and sunspot numbers. For instance, the sunspot number is 11 if there is a single sunspot, and 23 if there are three sunspots in two groups. So someone looking at old sunspot records, and seeing a sunspot number of 150 for a certain day, assumes that the appearance of 150 simultaneous sunspots in a single day is a common occurrence.

Or they might take a look at a graph of smoothed sunspot numbers, such as the one here, and complain because the graph had recently changed without notice, or that the graph at the current date was incorrect because it showed the cycle turning up, when that has not happened. What they don't know is that every point on the graph is based on the average of a year of sunspot data and is placed in the middle of that year. So for any points within the past six months, up to half are based on predicted data. If NOAA, for instance, predicts sunspot numbers to rise in the future, it is normal to see the graph rising when in fact the sunspot numbers have not yet increased. Some of the erroneous accounts have pushed some sort of conspiracy theory, claiming that "the government" doesn't want us to know how rare recent sunspots have become.

Sometimes a letter to the editor of a newspaper, or a blog remark, will state -- without attribution to any source -- that the sunspot number for a certain month was only 3. They probably heard somewhere that there were only three sunspots making an appearance one month, when the actual average daily sunspot number for the month was several times that.

Solar Cycles

There has been a lot of commentary on the current sunspot count with many commentators jumping the gun and predicting a long lived low like the rather famous Maunder Minimum. This timely article puts us back on track and tells us to hold on a minute. Fears of a protracted low are very premature.

Another aspect of the sun spot record that has always bothered me is that although our records since the early 1700’s has been well maintained and certainly meeting today’s standards, the early period of telescope usage between 1609 and 1700 may have been a lot more dicey. At least that was the apparent consensus forty years ago. In other words during the early going and even late into the mid nineteenth century with the advent of Wolf’s methodology, sunspot counting was prone to subjective decisions.

This may not sound like a lot, but you only need to decide among your group of observers that the observed image is one foot across for fifty years and then switch to better equipment and an easier two foot image to change the image usefulness by a factor of four. There were only a handful of observers who all knew each other and it is easy to see how improving equipment would have quietly allowed the sun spot count to creep up.

In other words, the low count for the Maunder Minimum may hugely reflect the limitations of the equipment and numbers of observers. I still think that there was a minimum but I simply do not totally trust the data.

Even today, no one is sitting there counting sun spots. Rather data sampling and formulas are shaking out the current number as they should. It is just a huge mistake to extrapolate that level of precision back over the centuries. Yet it feels like it could be done.

This means that the attempt to link the known event of the Little Ice Age with the shaky Maunder Minimum is unconvincing and similar to the linking of CO2 concentration and Global Warming,

What's Wrong with the Sun? (Nothing)

July 11, 2008: Stop the presses! The sun is behaving normally.

So says NASA solar physicist David Hathaway. "There have been some reports lately that Solar Minimum is lasting longer than it should. That's not true. The ongoing lull in sunspot number is well within historic norms for the solar cycle."

This report, that there's nothing to report, is newsworthy because of a growing buzz in lay and academic circles that something is wrong with the sun. Sun Goes Longer Than Normal Without Producing Sunspots declared one recent press release. A careful look at the data, however, suggests otherwise.

But first, a status report: "The sun is now near the low point of its 11-year activity cycle," says Hathaway. "We call this 'Solar Minimum.' It is the period of quiet that separates one Solar Max from another."

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/images/solarcycleupdate/ssn_predict_l.gif

Above: The solar cycle, 1995-2015. The "noisy" curve traces measured sunspot numbers; the smoothed curves are predictions. Credit: D. Hathaway/NASA/MSFC. [more]

During Solar Max, huge sunspots and intense solar flares are a daily occurance. Auroras appear in Florida. Radiation storms knock out satellites. Radio blackouts frustrate hams. The last such episode took place in the years around 2000-2001.

During Solar Minimum, the opposite occurs. Solar flares are almost non-existant while whole weeks go by without a single, tiny sunspot to break the monotony of the blank sun. This is what we are experiencing now. Although minima are a normal aspect of the solar cycle, some observers are questioning the length of the ongoing minimum, now slogging through its 3rd year.

"It does seem like it's taking a long time," allows Hathaway, "but I think we're just forgetting how long a solar minimum can last." In the early 20th century there were periods of quiet lasting almost twice as long as the current spell. (See the end notes for an example.) Most researchers weren't even born then.

Hathaway has studied international sunspot counts stretching all the way back to 1749 and he offers these statistics: "The average period of a solar cycle is 131 months with a standard deviation of 14 months. Decaying solar cycle 23 (the one we are experiencing now) has so far lasted 142 months--well within the first standard deviation and thus not at all abnormal. The last available 13-month smoothed sunspot number was 5.70. This is bigger than 12 of the last 23 solar minimum values."

In summary, "the current minimum is not abnormally low or long."

The longest minimum on record, the Maunder Minimum of 1645-1715, lasted an incredible 70 years. Sunspots were rarely observed and the solar cycle seemed to have broken down completely. The period of quiet coincided with the Little Ice Age, a series of extraordinarily bitter winters in Earth's northern hemisphere. Many researchers are convinced that low solar activity, acting in concert with increased volcanism and possible changes in ocean current patterns, played a role in that 17th century cooling.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/images/solarcycleupdate/ssn_yearlyNew2.jpg

For reasons no one understands, the sunspot cycle revived itself in the early 18th century and has carried on since with the familiar 11-year period. Because solar physicists do not understand what triggered the Maunder Minimum or exactly how it influenced Earth's climate, they are always on the look-out for signs that it might be happening again.

The quiet of 2008 is not the second coming of the Maunder Minimum, believes Hathaway. "We have already observed a few sunspots from the next solar cycle," he says. (See Solar Cycle 24 Begins.) "This suggests the solar cycle is progressing normally."

What's next? Hathaway anticipates more spotless days1, maybe even hundreds, followed by a return to Solar Max conditions in the years around 2012.

Stay tuned to Science@NASA for updates.

Author: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASA