![]() ![]() While the SW McIntosh group could update their terminator dates and prediction methods on twitter or in arXiv drafts that’s not been happening: the focus is on merits of the forecast. The latter has its own update site that does not include SILSO or NCAR. While Belgium’s SILSO provides updates of predictions once a month, those are in-house predictions that don’t include those of NCAR or NOAA/NASA. No question, the sun has some memory of the state that it’s been in (hysteresis), yet predictive relevance falls off rapidly after a Hale cycle or two, limiting predictive utility for SC25. So here it might be better to re-calibrate the time scale with F10.7 and other time series, possibly with cross-correlation optimization. The NCAR model of solar cycles will again use sunspot records because that alone picks up 25 eleven year cycles, yet a Hilbert transform cannot escape underlying mediocracy: the benefit of length is offset by worsening quality at these earlier times (though that record does reveal unexpected range of variation). What’s needed is a much broader range of trackables and full integration with the remarkable incoming satellite data. No science background needed it’s not too distant from the daily horoscope. Sunspot records are perhaps too accessible - anyone with a phone can download data, find fancied periodicities, promote eccentric theories on social media, associate peaks with lost Roman battles, troughs with little ice ages and invent convenient global cooling conspiracies. The question is, how relevant are long-ago cycles? Auroras may have a longer written record as do Be-10 and C-14 in ice cores, tree rings and stalactites but these have calibration issues, only track limited aspects of solar activity and those indirectly, and have no prospects for prediction. Sunspot numbers are not the best benchmark for predicting duration, intensity or downwind impacts of the coming solar cycle yet they get inordinate attention because they have by far the longest observational record - all the way back to the invention of the telescope. Sunspots are not that fundamental but instead one of many manifestations of solar dynamics taking place at deeper levels. So with the sunspot record not only an inherently noisy proxy for magnetohydrodynamics but that compounded by a record-keeping shambles, harmonic analysis can’t be expected to work miracles.Ī Solar Cycle Lost in 1793-1800: Early Sunspot Observations Resolve the Old Mystery A major revision of sunspot counting methodology in 2015 did not elicit consensus (for good reason) integration of newly discovered observational records throw off thousands of prior publications faux controversy continues over a missing cycle within the Dalton grand minimum which largely repairs even-odd Hale cycle pairing. ![]() The sun’s rotation can hide sunspot emergence and evolution from telescopes for half of each month. Advanced satellite instruments collect vast additional detail that goes unutilized in 1D graphs of sunspot numbers. Watching high resolution movies of the photosphere quickly reveals the utter inadequacy of historic characterization (sunspot counts, areas, groups) not fully mitigated by centuries of dedicated observation and tabulation by designated official record keepers (today, the Royal Observatory of Belgium). Sunspots are currently catalogued as active regions by NOAA SWPC (reaching AR2807 on, HARP 6285) though the nomenclature itself does not capture initial latitude or hemisphere much less birth, growth and decay processes. Solar research is not driven so much by questions in fundamental physics as by practical applications, notably predicting catastrophic ‘space weather’ events affecting the terrestrial electric grid, orbiting satellite electronics and astronaut safety its followers hope for big X-class flares just Arctic watchers want record melt seasons. Astronomy journals embed advanced graphics and use Dexter format suited to inline analysis in the cryosphere, we are still taking page screenshots. Solar is light-years ahead of Arctic sea ice in terms of Big Data organization and dissemination, though it wouldn’t take much to adapt JHelioviewer to Arctic satellites because like AstroImageJ, it has already been forked to cell biology. The first sunspots are being counted, tracked and characterized in near real-time (along with flares, coronal mass emissions and geomagnetic storms) by various institutions and talented citizen-scientists who use the free JHelioviewer app to produce remarkable graphics (that make clever use of the jpeg2000 spec) out of the many daily terabytes of incoming solar satellite data. Solar Cycle 25 is well underway though it is too soon to say if NCAR will outperform the NOAA/NASA ‘expert panel’.
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