Articles Tagged "Solar News"

According to a study in Geographical Research published by Wiley-Blackwell, the droughts in eastern Australia are related to the solar magnetic phases and not the greenhouse effect.

From WattsUpWithThat

Sun poised to make history with first spotless month since 1913

Many people that have have an interest in the interaction between the Sun and Earth have been keeping a watchful eye on several metrics of solar activity recently. The most popular of course has been sunspot watching.

The sun has been particularly quiet in the last several months, so quiet in fact that Australia’s space weather agency recently revised their solar cycle 24 forecast, pushing the expected date for a ramping up of cycle 24 sunspots into the future by six months.

From The Herald-Dispatch

Show features West Virginia’s caves

“There is conclusive evidence that, in fact, solar output affects droughts in North America based on the study of stalagmites,” Springer said in a news release. “Their growth is directly related to the amount of water obtained from the surface and we can study the history of droughts – some that have lasted 100 years.”

From ARRL.Org - Hartford,CT,USA

The K7RA Solar Update

A familiar sight appeared this week, as a sunspot emerged for one day, then was gone. Based on its magnetic polarity and high position in our Sun's southern hemisphere, sunspot 1003 was a new Solar Cycle 24 sunspot; like all the other recent sunspots, it was short lived.

SAN FRANCISCO: New satellite measurements have revealed that the Earth's upper atmosphere 'breathes' every five, seven or nine days. Each 'breath' represents a response to changes in the solar wind, which is produced by particles escaping the Sun's upper atmosphere. The wind fluctuates as the Sun rotates, alternatively heating the upper air of Earth's atmosphere and allowing it to cool. When the atmosphere is hot, it expands; when it is cool, it contracts. Scientists have long known that the Earth's atmosphere changes in response to solar fluctuations - but previously it was thought that these fluctuations occurred in cycles of 11 years, 27 days and 24 hours, corresponding to the sunspot cycle and the rotation of the Sun and Earth.

From New Scientist (subscription) - UK

New sunspots may signal end of solar dry spell
by Rachel Courtland

New spots are beginning to break out on the face of the Sun and may signal the end of a dry spell in solar activity. Watching for more spots in the coming months could help determine how severe – and potentially damaging to Earth's satellites and power grids – the next solar cycle will be.

From RedOrbit.Com

Norway's Space Adventures
by Brekke, Pal

Space exploration is more than daring astronauts and thrilling astronomy. It has practical applications that are becoming increasingly apparent. Norway is a small but important space nation that envisions playing a larger role in this exploration than do most countries. NORWAY HAS A LONG TRADITION AS A SPACE NATION, IN no small measure due to its northern position on the globe. Kristian Birkeland's famous Terrella experiment in 1896 in which he created synthetic northern lights can be seen as the start of modern space activities. He understood that it was the sun that caused the aurora borealis (as well as its southern-hemisphere counterpart, the aurora australis) and that particles from the sun interact with earth's magnetic field and atmosphere.

October 27-29, 2004, Meredith, New Hampshire

Widespread empirical evidence from the extensive Earth climate datasets suggests the presence of an 11-year solar signal of order 0.1K in surface, atmospheric, and ocean temperatures. But general circulation models (GCMs) underestimate this response by as much as a factor of five. The GCMs account primarily for direct forcing by changing incoming total radiation and assume that the response time for climate feedback processes to this external forcing is of order 100 years. Processes and pathways not included in the GCMs may help facilitate the larger than predicted climate response to decadal solar variability. Solar variations in the UV spectrum modulate stratospheric ozone concentrations, which may couple to climate via radiative and dynamical pathways.

These pathways may involve the Northern and Southern annular modes, allowing a solar signal to be amplified and reach Earth's surface. Internal atmosphere-ocean oscillations such as the NAO and ENSO may also play a role. Clouds may expedite the feedback process, as they appear to also exhibit variability with the solar cycle. Stochastic climate variability may amplify the relatively small solar variations. Other, non-linear, climate processes are speculated.

We wonder if the Met Office read Science News?

From Science News - USA

Lowdown on the sun

“This extreme minimum has important implications for the solar dynamo for solar activity and perhaps even for terrestrial climate,” comments solar physicist Spiro Antiochos of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The dynamo is the roiling motions of gas inside the sun that generate the sun’s magnetic field.

Because the magnetic field at solar minimum acts as the seed field for the next minimum, “it may well be that the next cycle will be low, which could have a cooling effect on terrestrial weather," Antiochos says. "There appears to be evidence for a correlation between lack of activity and terrestrial cooling.” Such cooling was observed during an extended period of unusually low solar activity about 300 years ago known as the Maunder Minimum

by Carolyn Barry

The sun's fluctuations can help predict extreme climatic events on Earth decades ahead of time, new research suggests.

Solar cycles are 11-year phases during which the sun's activity ebbs and flows, accompanied by an increase in sunspots on the sun's surface. (Watch a video of how solar storms cause "sun quakes.")