Dalton Minimum Returns

Others are beginning to take note

Russ Steele

Robert Fanney writes Very Low Solar Activity Causes Some to Speculate About a New Dalton Minimum

In 2004, NASA scientists started looking forward to a new solar minimum. In 2005, it began. At this time most scientists expected the new solar cycle 24 to begin in late 2006 or early 2007 with a following ramp up in solar activity.

But 2006 and 2007, according to NASA data, passed without any sign of a new solar cycle. During this time, the sun remained unusually quiet. Then, in early 2008, scientists finally found what they were waiting for -- a single sunspot with a reversed magnetic polarity. As a switch in magnetic polarity usually presages an increase in sunspot activity building up to a new solar maximum, scientists around the world proclaimed the new solar cycle had finally begun.

Now, nearly two months later, NASA observations show the sun is still unusually quiet. Day after day, the sun displays few, if any, sunspots. Even coronal holes are curiously absent. The long solar minimum now stretching into its third year coupled with curiously low solar activity even for a solar minimum is causing some scientists to speculate if the sun is entering a period of anemic activity like the most recent Dalton Minimum.

New spot, but for how long

A new Cycle 24 arrived on the scene today, the last one was on January 13th.  It is a high latitude spot with the right polarity according to a post on Watts Up With That.  It is rather small, and I wonder if it could have been spotted by early observers. Now we will have to wait and see if it increases in size or just blinks out like the other recent spots.  

Update #1: Spot 1013 is fading fast, should be gone by the end of the day.  How many 1700 and 1800 observers would have spotted this small spot. No many is my guess.

Space Weather wishes Galileo Happy Birthday

Space Weather has an interesting post on Galileo and his observations of sunspots in HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GALILEO.

Graphic, Sunspot sketches by Galileo

From Spaceweather.com

On February 15, 1564, Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, Italy. Galileo is an important person in the history of space weather. Contrary to popular belief, he didn't discover sunspots, but he was one of the first to observe them using a telescope.

In Galileo's day, many people believed sunspots were satellites of the sun. Galileo proved otherwise. By drawing sunspots every day, he discovered that the sun spins and that sunspots are located on (or very near) the sun's surface. Galileo thought sunspots might be clouds

Now we know what sunspots really are: huge islands of magnetism. Magnetic fields generated by the sun's inner dynamo poke through the sun's surface, forming dark areas typically a few times wider than Earth. The behemoths Galileo sketched in 1613 were as wide as Jupiter.

If Galileo were alive today, the 445-year-old scientist would make very little progress on the problem of sunspots. This is a year of deep solar minimum. So far, 85% of the days in 2009 have brought blank suns--no sunspots, no flares, no great magnetic storms, in short, no way to celebrate Galileo's birthday! To the sunspots we wish many happy returns.

Low radio flux predicts low cycle 24?

Russ Steele

Click Graphic for a larger impage

David Archibald writes at Watts Up With That:

What is evident is that this minimum is quite different from the previous four in that the intra-monthly amplitude has died from June 2008.  The monthly average low was July 2008 and the series has been in uptrend at 0.7 units/month thereafter.  This is a very weak but very consistent uptrend, perhaps the first sign of a rising Solar Cycle 24.  There is very little noise in this signal, suggesting a very weak Solar Cycle 24.

Ap Index continues to decline

Russ Steele

Anthony has an other discussion of the declining Ap Index at Watts Up With That. David Archibald has some more input.

Cycle 23 is still with us

Russ Steele

Space Weather has spot # 1012 visible here. 

Update #1: The sunspot is fading.  When will Cycle 23 finally be gone?

Grand Minimum: Legacy for Our Children

Russ Steele

Retired U.S. Navy Physicist and Engineer James A. Marusek wrote the following article,  which was posted on the CO2 Skeptics Blog. Marusek said he was looking for more exposure than he would get in a letter to the editor. He has an important message for all of us and I am going to post it in full below.

I have four grown children and four grandchildren and I worry about how they will fare under a Grand Minimum. But, most of them are more worried about the dangers of global warming.  Grandpa does not get much traction these days, when teachers and the press are filled with doom and gloom over global warming. Though crazy grandpa keeps reminding them there has been no warming for ten years and the sun which controls our climate remains quiet.

Legacy for Our Children

There is a lot of talk these days about the legacy we will leave our children and our grandchildren. When I stare into the immediate future, I see a frightening legacy caked in darkness and famine. Instead of intelligently preparing, we find ourselves whittling away this precious time chasing fraudulent theories. We have a decade to prepare, but have a misguided sense of direction and urgency.

Climate change is primarily driven by nature. It has been true in the days of my father and his father and all those that came before us. Because of science, not junk science, we have slowly uncovered some of the fundamental mysteries of nature. Our Milky Way galaxy is awash with cosmic rays. These are high speed charged particles that originate from exploding stars. Because they are charged, their travel is strongly influenced by magnetic fields. Our sun produces a magnetic field that extends to the edges of our solar system.

Dalton Minimum Drought in California?

Russ Steele

There has been a lot of scary stories in the news about global warming and the loss of the California's Sierra snow pack, including one on Channel Six on Saturday.  I have reported in previous posts that both warming and cooling can produce droughts. I am also interested in the role of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) in producing California droughts.  With a quiet Sun moving toward a no sun spots record, the probability of another Grand Minimum increases every day that there are no new sunspots. See Update #1 below.

What happened during the Dalton Minimum, did the cooler temperatures reduce or increase the snow pack. If we can assume that river flow in the Sierra River basins is representative of the snow pack, I decided to look for a reconstruction of the Sacramento river flow. Real data has only been collected since 1906, and by the 1930s the State was damming the Sacramento and tributaries, disrupting the natural flow.

The World Data Center for Paleoclimatology in Boulder Colorado has a river flow data base where I found a Reconstruction of Sacramento River System Runoff From Tree Rings developed by D.M Meko in 2001 for the California Department of Water Resources Board.

The reconstruction calculated the total annual flow in millions of acre-feet using tree ring chronologies for a proxy measuring tool. The theory is more moisture produced more growth, which shows up in the tree rings. Menlo's reconstruction is based on a set of 42 tree-ring chronologies covering from AD 901 to 1977 in the Sacramento River basin and its tributaries, including the Feather River.

Another Dalton Minimum predicted!

C. de Jager, S. Duhau: Forecasting the parameters of sunspot cycle 24 and beyond.

Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, vol. 71 (2009), 239 – 245

Abstract. Solar variability is controlled by the internal dynamo which is a nonlinear system. We develop a physical-statistical method for forecasting solar activity that takes into account the non-linear character of the solar dynamo. The method is based on the generally accepted mechanisms of the dynamo and on recently found systematic properties of the long-term solar variability. The amplitude modulation of the Schwabe cycle in the dynamo’s magnetic field components can be decomposed in an invariant transition level and three types of oscillations around it. The regularities that we observe in the behaviour of these oscillations during the last millennium enable us to forecast solar activity. We find that the system is presently undergoing a transition from the recent Grand Maximum to another regime. This transition started in 2000 and it is expected to end around the maximum of cycle 24, foreseen for 2014, with a maximum sunspot number Rmax = 68 ± 17. At that time a period of lower solar activity will start. That period will be one of regular oscillations, as occurred between 1730 and 1923. The first of these oscillations may even turn out to be as strongly negative as around 1810, in which case a short Grand Minimum similar to the Dalton one might develop. This moderate to low-activity episode is expected to last for at least one Gleissberg cycle (60 - 100 years).