First sunspot for Solar cycle 24, will cycle 24 be strong or weak ?
January 10th, 2008 by Warwick HughesKevin at www.solarcycle24.com/ is reporting the onset of solar cycle 24, there is a discussion board there too.
Centuries of sunspot data show that periods of low sunspot numbers correlate with periods of cool climate. Solar minimum between cycles 23 and 24 is expected to be in a few months time.
Starting in December 2006 I have several blog posts drawing attention to contrasting predictions re the strength of cycle 24, these are all linked later in this post.
But first let’s just quickly list links to predictions by various climate research groups.
First in May 2006 Dr Hathaway of NASA predicts a weak cycle 25.
Then in December 2006 Dr Hathaway is predicting a big cycle 24 with a smoothed sunspot number of over 160.
In April 2007 a forecast issued by the NOAA Space Environment Center in coordination with an international panel of solar experts. NOAA says, “The late decline of Cycle 23 has helped shift the panel away from its earlier leaning toward a strong Cycle 24. Now the group is evenly split between strong and weak.”
Solar minimum between cycles 23 and 24 is expected to be in a few months time. The next few years will be fascinating to watch unfold as the predictions for cycle 24 can be refined. Currently the range of preidctions by NOAA are seen here.
I have several Blog posts drawing attention to David’s important prediction that Solar Cycle 24 would be delayed, shorter than other groups were saying and could in his opinion lead to a cooling climate.
On December 16 2006 I drew attention to;
Contrasting forecasts for Solar Cycle 24
then a couple of months later I posted
Has anybody seen any recent sunspots ?
February 23rd, 2007
Then on March 27 I posted David Archibald’s new paper predicting global cooling ahead;
The Past and Future of Climate
Exactly where Lockwood and Fröhlich are wrong
August 11th, 2007 by Warwick Hughes
Solar Cycle 23 not ending yet
July 6th, 2007 Download a PowerPoint presentation of David Archibald’s latest edit of his paper, “The Past and Future of Climate” presented at the Lavoisier Conference in Melbourne June 2007.
David Archibald can be seen and heard on YouTube talking about his 4 Part paper “Past & Future Climate change”.
Posted in IPCC, News and Views, Solar | 22 Comments »
January 10th, 2008 at 4:51 am
Warwick, the SSRC “news” is a hoax !
Please delete all link related to it.
January 10th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Yes, SSRC appears to be a one man show, a web construct, “vaporware” so to speak. I second the idea of deleting it.
January 10th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Agreed. Posting up SSRC stuff makes “us” look bad. Its a total hoax.
I’d like for the experts to chime in here on a few questions I have.
Does this sunspot draw a line in the sand? What I mean is, do we say #23 is done and #24 is happening now? I believe David Archibald said in a post that #24 won’t officially begin for ~12 months after the first high latitude sunspot. So, that means we’re still chugging along on #23, yes/no?
Based on the arrival of this 1 high latitude spot, are there any new updated predictions about the intensity and duration of #24?
January 10th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Done
January 11th, 2008 at 10:10 am
Traditionally, the time of sunspot cycle min was usually regarded as the point where the 12 month smoothed curves of the reducing old cycle and the increasing new cycle cross over – however in grand minima like we appear to be entering at the moment with very few sunspots at all for long periods of time the crossover will be difficult to pinpoint accurately, and other methods will probably need to be employed.
In the past the solar min has usually been 12 to 20 months after the first new cycle spot, but I think we are now in uncharted territory, so it is very much up in the air.
Regarding the solar cycle 24 max, working through Dr Landscheidt’s methods published May 1999, I came up with two possible dates – unfortunately he only included one of them in his paper being 2011.8+-0.16 years – the other he did not include is 2013.6+-0.16 years.
Given that we have not yet reached solar min, the 2011.8 date is almost certainly dead in the water already.
See my blog for more, including links to Dr Landscheidt’s papers:
Dr Landscheidt’s Solar Cycle 24 Prediction
landscheidt.auditblogs.com/archives/17
I speculate that Dr Landscheidt did not consider the July 2013 date as possible because that would make cycle 23 incredibly long (which has turned out to be the case), and this would also seem to require a further reduction of the intensity of cycle 25 below his forecast of an already weak max of around R70 (12 month smoothed), so a very speculative R50 to R60 might be closer.
January 11th, 2008 at 11:57 am
Carl, that’s what I remember.
From Landscheidt’s previous work, I remember him saying back in the early 80s that solar activity would begin to decrease after 1990, and after a longish #23, we’d have several (4? 5?) cycles of R
January 11th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Not sure why it cut off my entry. Here’s the rest:
…we’d have several (4? 5?) cycles of R
January 11th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
OK, something with one of the characters.
… we’d have several (4? 5?) cycles of R less than 80.
So far, he’s nailed everything. #23 was indeed less intense than #22, and clearly it’s cycle is longer than any in the past 100 years.
January 15th, 2008 at 5:22 am
As a penance for posting that ill reputed SSRC link here is a paper that has some similarities of concept with Landscheidt’s papers, and put us in a similar position as his at the present, a period of unstable climate with alternating warm and cool cycles, a configuration similar to the 1785-1843 cycle for 1985-2040. Worth a read.
Ann. Geophys., 18, 399-405, 2000
www.ann-geophys.net/18/399/2000/
© European Geosciences Union 2000
Can origin of the 2400-year cycle of solar activity be caused by solar inertial motion?
I. Charvátová
Geophysical Institute AS CR, Boční II, 141 31 Praha 4, Czech Republic
Abstract. A solar activity cycle of about 2400 years has until now been of uncertain origin. Recent results indicate it is caused by solar inertial motion. First we describe the 178.7-year basic cycle of solar motion. The longer cycle, over an 8000 year interval, is found to average 2402.2 years. This corresponds to the Jupiter/Heliocentre/Barycentre alignments (9.8855 × 243). Within each cycle an exceptional segment of 370 years has been found characterized by a looping pattern by a trefoil or quasitrefoil geometry. Solar activity, evidenced by 14C tree-ring proxies, shows the same pattern. Solar motion is computable in advance, so this provides a basis for future predictive assessments. The next 370-year segment will occur between AD 2240 and 2610.
January 26th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Peak Warming, Peak Oil
To put the whole Climate Change issue into perspective vis-a-vis the Peak Oil Crisis, everyone needs to ask themselves, their associates, all sitting elected officials and those seeking office, especially the office of President of the United States, “What is more threatening in both the long and short terms, a beneficial 1 degree F rise in average world temperatures over the past 100 years, or a 1 percent decline in world oil production over the last 100 weeks – with steepening declines forecast? Furthermore, can our economy better deal with declining fuel inventories in an environment of persistent warming, or in an environment of declining average temperatures over the next several decades, the most likely scenario given the highly reliable solar inertial motion (SIM) model forecasts of climate change?” Solar cycle # 24 will tell the story. Stay tuned.
January 28th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Deep ecologists want to reduce human population down to less than 1 Billion, does that answer the question? Of course they want to do everything possible to result in a global disaster not if but when the next wave of cooling hits. Maybe the wave is already starting to break.
February 5th, 2008 at 3:32 am
I’ve just blogged about what I regard as a couple of false starts to Solar Cycle 24. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that SC24 is going to be mega-late and very weak (with all that means for Earth’s climate) but we’ll have to see.
Warwick, if you’re not too busy could you take a look at the breaking of the Aussie drought and the implications for water policy?
February 5th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
John A: I’m liking your chances for a mega-late cycle 24. As one of your commenters noted the minimum has a number of measures, specifically noting coronal holes should be few and tightly transequatorial. Not there yet.
February 6th, 2008 at 3:06 am
These words of wisdom are from a European correspondent.
“Solar cycle 23 still dominates”
It is a great exaggeration to say that the cycle 24 has begun. It has made a small try, that failed to give the needed spurt for a new cycle.
The cycle 23 now dominates the Southern Hemisphere. The one cycle one-day spot in the beginning of January was high in the Northern Hemisphere.
February 6th, 2008 at 3:18 am
John A, do not expect the rain associated with the developing La Nina in East Australia to be too much taken account of in water policy. I think the three major cities over there are signed up for seawater desalination on a scale of multi-tens of $billions.
In the case of Melbourne there was huge flooding rains over the Mitchell catchment last year but the Govts attention is not on the obvious damsite which has been known for decades but on vastly more expensive desal.
Note in Perth what the rain situation has been in our catchments for 32 yrs, yet you can not get these data into main media.
All for now.
February 9th, 2008 at 9:47 am
In the last week, the water supply for Sydney grew more than 3%.
For some reason, the rains haven’t reached Melbourne’s catchment and I’ve no idea why not.
February 10th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Perth had an extra-ordinary amount of rain a few days ago. I live 3 Ks south of the CBD and we had over a 100MM of rain. This was the wettest day I can ever recall in Perth.
Because we normally don’t get any rain at all or just a very small amount of rain between November and March that rain fell on bone dry catchments. In a normal year we don’t see net inflows into our dams until 6 or 8 weeks after the winter rains begin in late April or early May. You can clearly see this on the graphic below.
www.watercorporation.com.au/D/dams_storage.cfm?uid=3506-8538-5661-1132
The BoM is predicting above average winter rainfall. Depending on when that rain starts, we could see net inflows into Perth dams much early than usual, because the ground is already wet from the recent rain, and consequently large net inflows this winter (the two seem well correlated).
I predict net inflows by mid-May. I also predict no change to the Water Corporation’s deceptive advertising campaign about our ‘drying climate’.
February 14th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Good discussion over at Wattsupwiththat.
wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/where-have-all-the-sunspots-gone/
March 6th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
If the changes in gloabl air temperatures are mainly caused by SOLAR activity, should we not see similar effects on other planets whose temperatures would not show the effects of LIFE. If so, someone ought to quickly get some satellite thermal readings of MARS or VENUS to see how the solar cycle has affected their respective “atmospheric” temperatures.
HUH?
March 31st, 2008 at 9:18 am
I understand there will be an aligment of Saturn and othre big planets for the peak of solar cycle 24. Will that have any influence on earth climate?
March 31st, 2008 at 11:36 am
Gidday Juanse Barros J,
Have you read this paper ?
Kenneth W. Dickman 2006, “Short and longer-term planetary effects on Sun and Earth”, Energy & Environment v. 17 no. 1, pp. 63-73.
It is referred to in Bob Foster’s article, “The Royal Society and the “dead hand of consensus”, April 23rd, 2006.
www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=40
Scroll down two thirds and look in Bob’s point Three.
April 2nd, 2008 at 3:06 am
Gidday Warwick, you were so quiet I was beginning to suspect you’d died in the saddle or something….
Solar Cycle 24 is still waiting in the wings, and all we’ve had since that fateful day when it was announced are more SC23 sunspot groups…
It looks like a bad time to be predicting a strong solar cycle or even more warming of the Earth.