The uncertainty of science! It is the start of the month, and thus time for another sunspot update, using NOAA’s monthly graph of the sunspot activity on the Earth-facing hemisphere, updated by NOAA to include the activity in February but annotated with extra information by me to illustrate the larger scientific context.

Last month I lambasted NOAA’s solar science panel for its consistently failed predictions, and made a tentative prediction of my own, suggesting the ramp down to solar minimum might not be occurring as they had predicted in April 2025.

This month I can lambast myself, because the Sun in February saw a significant drop in sunspots, including three consecutive days in which the Sun was blank of spots, for the first time since 2022. This drop supports the NOAA panel prediction and makes my prediction look foolish, but it also suggests the ramp down is continuing to go faster than predicted.


The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community for both the previous solar maximum as well as the ongoing maximum. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007 for the previous maximum, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The blue curve is their revised May 2009 prediction. The red curve is the new prediction, first posted by NOAA in April 2020. At the beginning of April 2025 NOAA’s panel of solar scientists added the purple/magenta curve line, predicting that solar maximum was over, and that the ramp down to minimum had begun.

The green dot indicates the level of sunspot activity during the month of February, dropping well below all predictions.

There are several ways to interpret the graph as it presently stands. The drop in February supports the prediction of the NOAA panel, but it continues to show a ramp down that is generally faster than predicted by the purple/magenta line.

The general trend since April 2025 however could be interpreted differently, as the overall activity appears to have flattened at a level that could represent the bottom of a saddle. If the maximum does what it did in 2014, we could still see a second peak of activity, producing a double-peaked maximum.

A third interpretation is that this low but flattened level of activity is merely a pause in the ramp down. If the downward trend continues at this rate, this particular solar cycle will end up being very short, less than ten years — far shorter than predicted by the NOAA panel. For the past 250 years, short cycles were routinely high in activity. This cycle however is a weak one, so for it to be short and weak would be unprecedented. The Sun might simply be randomly holding its activity at this level as it completes the cycle at a more normal length.

All guesses. We can only wait to see what happens.

I must highlight this lack of understanding however, and how it is has consistently resulted in failed predictions for the past two solar cycles. The Sun is the biggest driver of the Earth’s climate, and we simply do not understand its behavior on a fundamental level. These cycles however do impact the climate, and if we don’t understand them and can’t reliably predict their behavior, how can we possible predict the climate over the next hundred years?

We can’t, and anyone who claims they can is either fooling themselves, or lying for other reasons (usually political).