Time for this month’s sunspot update. To do this each month I begin by taking NOAA’s own monthly update of its graph of sunspot activity and annotating it with extra information to illustrate the larger scientific context.

This annotated graph showing the August activity is below, and for the third month in a row sunspot activity increased (as indicated by the green dot), so that the August number of sunspots now closely matched the April 2025 prediction by NOAA’s panel of solar scientists that the Sun was finally beginning its ramp down from solar maximum.


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 problem with the NOAA prediction is that the steady rise in the past three months is not really what they predicted. Though the numbers last month matched their prediction, the recent upward trend is the opposite of that prediction. We still have no idea what the Sun will do in the coming months. The trend says we might see a continued rise to a second peak, producing the second straight double-peaked maximum.

The numbers instead suggest that the NOAA prediction is correct, and that the ramp down to minimum is on-going, despite the wild fluctuations well below that prediction in the past few months.

Either way, it is important to note that none of the NOAA predictions for both this and last solar maximums have been correct. The Sun continues to baffle them, and this perplexity will not change until the scientists studying it finally begin to understand the fundamental processes in the Sun’s magnetic field and dynamo that produce these cycles. At the moment our knowledge is merely superficial, linking one to the other without a clear understanding of why.

And knowing why is critical. The Sun’s energy makes life possible on Earth. Knowing how that energy output might change is essential knowledge for using our adaptive abilities to adapt to any changes. Right now, any theories on what might happen next are pure guesswork, and this is not a good foundation to work from.