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A fired up Sun

As it does every month, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center today released its monthly update showing the ongoing changes of the Sun’s solar cycle sunspot activity. I have posted the graph below the fold.

For the fourth month in a row the Sun’s sunspot activity has leaped upward. In fact, for the first time since I have been tracking sunspot activity, beginning in 2008, the Sun’s sunspot activity exceeds the predicted activity by a significant amount. Since the end of the previous maximum, the Sun had consistently failed to meet the expectations of solar scientists by producing far fewer sunspots than expected.

In the past few months, however, the Sun has recovered, its activity firing upward, including some of the most active and largest sunspots in years.

It is therefore not surprising that the solar scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center have once again adjusted upward their prediction for the next solar maximum, now calling for a peak sunspot number of 89 occurring in May 2013. This is the second time they have raised this prediction in the past two months, first raising it from 70 to 77 in October. Even at this larger number, the upcoming maximum is still expected to be the weakest in 80 years.

What the Sun will do after this maximum remains a mystery. Solar scientists even have reason to believe that the Sun might very well stop producing visible sunspots for decades. That the Sun is suddenly showing life today throws a kink into this theory.

October sunspot graph

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

One comment

  • Kelly Starks

    It still looks like they rae expecting the peak to only be 3/4ths the ’00 peak. Also whats with the huge flares, then quiet, then huge flares?

    Given solar activity like this influence Earths (adn everything else in the solar system) “climate”, we could be moving into some very bumpy weather.

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