How Small Will Solar Cycle 24 Be?

Russ Steele

The Cosmic Heart has an interesting discussion with David Hathaway, Ph.D., Heliospheric Team Leader, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama:

“In the 50 years or so we’ve been making the (cosmic ray) measurements – yeah! this is by far the highest level of galactic cosmic rays that we’re seeing at Earth and we know exactly what is causing it. It’s the sun’s weakened magnetic fields and weakened solar winds that are all related to this Solar Cycle 24 minimum."

Hathaway finally admits that Leif Svalgaard was right back in 2006 when he predicted a small cycle.

But there also were people back at that time saying otherwise. A group of colleagues led by Leif Svalgaard, Ph.D., were looking at the sun’s polar fields and saying even at that point, the sun’s polar fields were significantly weaker than they had been before and those scientists back then predicted it was going to be a small cycle.

It is going to be a small cycle.

I’ve come around to that view now. I think there is little doubt in my mind now that we’re in for a small cycle. The big question now is how small? I think most of us are predicting small cycles. I think even the techniques I’m using now are suggesting HALF the size of the last three or four solar cycles, but my fear is that even that might be too big just from the fact that it’s taken so long for this Solar Cycle 24 to really get off the ground and start producing sunspots.

I have no doubt at this point that it’s going to be a little cycle. My current prediction is that it’s going to be about half of what we’ve seen in the last four solar cycles or so. But in my gut, I feel it’s going to be smaller than that! (laughs) It’s just so slow in taking off and the indicators that we see – both the polar fields and the geomagnetic indicators are lower than anything we’ve seen before.

The whole article is here. In the past a small cycle has resulted in cooler climate on the earth. The questions is will this be another Grand Minimum? The Cosmic Heart ask if the Hathaway's team discusses another Maunder Minimum. 

It comes up in conversations all the time! (laughs) There is no doubt about it - it’s in the back of our minds!

Certainly the Maunder Minimum comes up. We recently had a meeting of 60 or 70 solar and heliospheric physicists from around the world who met on Mount Desert Island in Maine back in late September.

The title of the meeting was “Understanding the Peculiar Solar Minimum” – meaning this one! (laughs) The interesting thing is that at one point during that meeting, we took a vote amongst ourselves about how many thought that this Solar Cycle 24 is so peculiar that it would have a name attached to it, like Maunder Minimum or Dalton Minimum. It was a small minority that thought that it was that peculiar.

The vast majority felt that this is a significant minimum. It’s smaller than anything we have seen in the 50 years of the Space Age. But it does look like you can go back 100 years or so and find other similar minima.

It looks like we should be preparing for global cooling rather than global warming.

Comments

[Fred from Canuckistan . . .]

also .

http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/11/james-marusek-on-solar-cycle-24.html