The Year of the Quiet Sun
 

"Solar flux measured at 20h UTC on 2.8 GHz was 68.7. The planetary A index was 6 (STAR Ap - based on the mean of three hour interval ap indices: 5.5). Three hour interval K indices: 32000012 (planetary), 33111113 (Boulder).

The background x-ray flux is below the class A1 level.

At midnight the visible solar disk was spotless. The solar flare activity level was very low"
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How many CALORIES do YOU have?
How many BTU's do you control?

Re: The Year of the Quiet Sun
 

Last two lines priceless.
Everybody is thinking arms and ammo.
Oh, well.

Re: The Year of the Quiet Sun
 

Todays DATA:

"Solar flux measured at 20h UTC on 2.8 GHz was 68.2. The planetary A index was 16 (STAR Ap - based on the mean of three hour interval ap indices: 15.5). Three hour interval K indices: 54422222 (planetary), 44433312 (Boulder).

The background x-ray flux is below the class A1 level.

At midnight the visible solar disk was spotless. The solar flare activity level was very low.

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. As you can see, the SOLAR flux has dropped a bit from yesterday's value, this quantity is measured daily at Boulder Colorado, since 1948, and is a numerical representation of the actual solar energy output at a specific wavelength.
You can monitor this site:
...................................... http://www.solen.info/solar/ ..............................

Re: The Year of the Quiet Sun
 

Can you tell us why this is significant?

Re: The Year of the Quiet Sun
 

Does this mean it won't be so damn hot this summer?

The Year of the Quiet Sun
 

The significance of the DATA presented is that it represents the HEAT output of the large bright disc often seen in the sky on a clear day.
When Mister Sun makes less heat, then Earth cools down.... There is some apparent delay built in to this mechanism, the "Thermal inertia" of the Ocean water tends to damp the short term temperature swings, but the obvious and certain trend for the last several years is cooling, and that is going to accelerate markedly if the sun doesnt "turn it up soon"
................... I am NOT making this stuff up..... The solar flux data is real, it is measured daily since 1948, and it is currently at a very LOW value..

Re: The Year of the Quiet Sun
 

BLASPHEMER!!!!!!!

Re: The Year of the Quiet Sun
 

Yah, what a moron, everybody knows the sun can't have nearly as much effect as a few parts per million of carbon dioxide.

Re: The Year of the Quiet Sun
 

It is amazing that people still seem to have the idea that the earth is the center of it all and all we do can change what is to be!!!!

It's all a cycle, always has been always will be until the end of time.

BTW, thanks, OP for the link.

Re: The Year of the Quiet Sun
 

The "sun" is merely an illusion foisted upon us by TPTB. Let's face it -- we are just players in an illusion on the holo-deck. Bill Gates is the only thing real in our "world".

Re: The Year of the Quiet Sun
 

From:http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog...nspot-mys.html

Dark spots, some as large as 50,000 miles in diameter, typically move across the surface of the sun, contracting and expanding as they go. These strange and powerful phenomena are known as sunspots, but now they are all gone. Not even solar physicists know why it’s happening and what this odd solar silence might be indicating for our future.

Although periods of inactivity are normal for the sun, this current period has gone on much longer than usual and scientists are starting to worry—at least a little bit. Recently 100 scientists from Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and North America gathered to discuss the issue at an international solar conference at Montana State University. Today's sun is as inactive as it was two years ago, and solar physicists don’t have a clue as to why.

"It continues to be dead," said Saku Tsuneta with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, program manager for the Hinode solar mission, noting that it is at least a little bit worrisome for scientists.

Dana Longcope, a solar physicist at MSU, said the sun usually operates on an 11-year cycle with maximum activity occurring in the middle of the cycle. The last cycle reached its peak in 2001 and is believed to be just ending now, Longcope said. The next cycle is just beginning and is expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012. But so far nothing is happening.

"It's a dead face," Tsuneta said of the sun's appearance.

Tsuneta said solar physicists aren't weather forecasters and they can't predict the future. They do have the ability to observe, however, and they have observed a longer-than-normal period of solar inactivity. In the past, they observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots. That period coincided with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700. Coincidence? Some scientists say it was, but many worry that it wasn’t.

Geophysicist Phil Chapman, the first Australian to become an astronaut with NASA, said pictures from the US Solar and Heliospheric Observatory also show that there are currently no spots on the sun. He also noted that the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7C.

"This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930," Dr Chapman noted in The Australian recently.

If the world does face another mini Ice Age, it could come without warning. Evidence for abrupt climate change is readily found in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica. One of the best known examples of such an event is the Younger Dryas cooling, which occurred about 12,000 years ago, named after the arctic wildflower found in northern European sediments. This event began and ended rather abruptly, and for its entire 1000 year duration the North Atlantic region was about 5�C colder. Could something like this happen again? There’s no way to tell, and because the changes can happen all within one decade—we might not even see it coming.

The Younger Dryas occurred at a time when orbital forcing should have continued to drive climate to the present warm state. The unexplained phenomenon has been the topic of much intense scientific debate, as well as other millennial scale events.

Now this 11-year low in Sunspot activity has raised fears among a small but growing number of scientists that rather than getting warmer, the Earth could possibly be about to return to another cooling period. The idea is especially intriguing considering that most of the world is in preparation for global warming.

Canadian scientist Kenneth Tapping of the National Research Council has also noted that solar activity has entered into an unusually inactive phase, but what that means—if anything—is still anyone’s guess. Another solar scientist, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, however, is certain that it’s an indication of a coming cooling period.

Sorokhtin believes that a lack of sunspots does indicate a coming cooling period based on certain past trends and early records. In fact, he calls manmade climate change "a drop in the bucket" compared to the fierce and abrupt cold that can potentially be brought on by inactive solar phases.

Sorokhtin’s advice: "Stock up on fur coats"…just in case.

Re: The Year of the Quiet Sun
 

Thanks for the site Fullpower!

Re: The Year of the Quiet Sun
 

The will cool off those global warmers... Next headlines are Ice Age about to begin!

Re: The Year of the Quiet Sun
 

Because this is shaping up to be like past cycles that caused famine.

PopScience/Hearst, Jan.27,09: What's Happening to the Sun? Graph from Russian Scientist shows the next two solar cycles being low = cool.

CanadaFreePress, Jan.26,09: Recycling Climate Change for Profit
March0409: Brrr! What's Happening to the Sun?
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rYkq2dKIri...jan08-520E.png http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rYkq2dKIri...jan08-520E.png

Re: The Year of the Quiet Sun
 

Ahhhhhhhh just chill out dammit

Re: The Year of the Quiet Sun
 

TA I love ya, but what does that image have to do with the low solar output?

SJones, TelegraphUK, Dec.30,08: Don't believe all you read in the Sun - despite what one 19th-century academic believed, the recent slump in sunspots is not the cause of our economic woesNote the MSM BS (denial) in the last paragraph. A fit is a fit, not to be denied because one does not understand cause or association.

Solar flux has come up since summer though.

Considering we were as low as 65 last fall, that was damm close to 'a theoretical minimum of about 50'

http://www.rgemonitor.com/us-monitor..._to_outperform

Re: The Year of the Quiet Sun
 

It's a good thing we have all that dirty coal!

Re: The Year of the Quiet Sun
 

This looks like other typical cycle bottoms. Why is this alarming?

http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/SOLAR/F...e/pentflux.gif

Re: The Year of the Quiet Sun
 

Livingston and Penn write:
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. Here is the complete paper,

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/0...anish-by-2015/
and below are some excerpts:

Abstract: We have observed spectroscopic changes in temperature sensitive molecular lines, in the magnetic splitting of an Fe I line, and in the continuum brightness of over 1000 sunspot umbrae from 1990-2005. All three measurements show consistent trends in which the darkest parts of the sunspot umbra have become warmer (45K per year) and their magnetic field strengths have decreased (77 Gauss per year), independently of the normal 11-year sunspot cycle. A linear extrapolation of these trends suggests that few sunspots will be visible after 2015.



Figure – 1. Sample sunspot spectra from the data set. The dashed line is from a sunspot observed in June 1991, and the solid line was observed in January 2002. These provide examples of the trends seen in the data, where the OH molecular lines decrease in strength over time, and the magnetic splitting of the Fe line decreases over time. A magnetic splitting pattern for the January 2002 Fe line of 2466 Gauss is shown, while the June 1991 spectrum shows splitting from a 3183 Gauss field



Figure 2. – The line depth of OH 1565.3 nm for individual spots. The upper trace is the smoothed sunspot number showing the past and current sunspot cycles; the OH line depth change seems to smoothly decrease independently of the sunspot cycle.



Figure 3. – A linear fit to observed magnetic fields extrapolated to the minimum value observed for umbral magnetic fields; below a field strength of 1500G as measured with the Fe I 1564.8nm line no photospheric darkening is observed.



Figure 4 – A linear fit to the observed umbral contrast values, extrapolated to show that by 2014 the average umbrae would have the same brightness as the quiet Sun.

They write: Sunspot umbral magnetic fields also show systematic temporal changes during the observing period as demonstrated by the sample spectra in Figure 1. The infrared Fe 1564.8 nm is a favorable field diagnostic since the line strength changes less than a factor of two between the photosphere and spot umbra and the magnetic Zeeman splitting is fully resolved for all sunspot umbrae. In a histogram plot of the distribution of the umbral magnetic fields that we observe, 1500 Gauss is the smallest value measured. Below this value photospheric magnetic fields do not produce perceptible darkening. Figure 3 presents the magnetic fields smoothed by a 12 point running mean from 1998 to 2005. The ordinate is chosen so that 1500 G is the minimum. A linear fit to the changing magnetic field produces a slope of 77 Gauss per year, and intercepts the abscissa at 2015. If the present trend continues, this date is when sunspots will disappear from the solar surface.

Let us all hope that they are wrong, for a solar epoch period like the Maunder Minimum inducing a Little Ice Age will be a worldwide catastrophe economically, socially, environmentally, and morally.

I’m still very much concerned about the apparent step change in 2005 to a lower plateau of the Geomagnetic Average Planetary (Ap) index, that I’ve plotted below. This is something that does not appear in the previous cycle:


click for a larger image

What is most interesting about the Geomagnetic Average Planetary Index graph above is what happened around October 2005. Notice the sharp drop in the magnetic index and the continuance at low levels, almost as if something “switched off”.
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....................................... Please note the last sentence.....................

Re: The Year of the Quiet Sun
 

Sparky, I never said it was alarming. Could be a few decades of bad crops and temporary relief from global warming.

But that image you posted needs near 11/2 years of near flat line to bring it up to date.
Some other measures are low. Altough timing between cycles could be more of a factor than this article lets on.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2..._solarwind.htm

I wonder how much these properties normally vary within a sunspot cycle. Problem is 98 02 is the middle of a cycle and 08 08 the bottom.

But the comparisons for "the sun's underlying magnetic field has weakened by more than 30% since the mid-1990s," and "temperature and density of electrons in the solar wind have dropped since the mid-1990s" do compair at similar 1/2 phase of the solar cycle.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2.../electrons.jpg

And even if this soon returns to normal, this is far from what most predicted:

October9, 2007: Has Solar Cycle 24 Begun? related: Next Solar Storm Cycle Will Likely Start Next March, NOAA Warns Sun's Next 11-Year Cycle Could Be 50% Stronger