2013-11-11

Still Few Sunspots

Strange Doings on the Sun
Based on historical records, astronomers say the sun this fall ought to be nearing the explosive climax of its approximate 11-year cycle of activity—the so-called solar maximum. But this peak is "a total punk," said Jonathan Cirtain, who works at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as project scientist for the Japanese satellite Hinode, which maps solar magnetic fields.

"I would say it is the weakest in 200 years," said David Hathaway, head of the solar physics group at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
Sunspot activity is roughly correlated with temperatures.

To complicate the riddle, the sun also is undergoing one of its oddest magnetic reversals on record.

Normally, the sun's magnetic north and south poles change polarity every 11 years or so. During a magnetic-field reversal, the sun's polar magnetic fields weaken, drop to zero, and then emerge again with the opposite polarity. As far as scientists know, the magnetic shift is notable only because it signals the peak of the solar maximum, said Douglas Biesecker at NASA's Space Environment Center.

But in this cycle, the sun's magnetic poles are out of sync, solar scientists said. The sun's north magnetic pole reversed polarity more than a year ago, so it has the same polarity as the south pole.

"The delay between the two reversals is unusually long," said solar physicist Karel Schrijver at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, Calif.

The Effect of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and Sunspots on Earth’s surface temperature – Global Cooling predicted?

The reality is the climate models are way off and getting worse with each passing year, all with bias towards greater warming. Something is having a cooling effect on the climate and the models don't account for it. With billions of dollars of government research backing them and a need to justify carbon taxes, the scientists may have done what they did in other fields: they've cooked up what their paymasters ordered.

No comments:

Post a Comment