Tag: environment

Reviewing a book blacklisted by Amazon because it dared say things Amazon doesn’t like

1:35 pm

The Plague of Models, blacklisted by Amazon
The Plague of Models, blacklisted by Amazon

They’re coming for you next: Last week I posted an essay on the over-use and misuse of computer modeling in today’s scientific community, focused specifically on the unreliability of all climate models to successfully predict any actual climate trends.

One of the individuals who read my essay, Kenneth Green, immediately commented here on Behind the Black to note that he had just published a book on this very subject, entitled The Plague of Models: How Computer Modeling Corrupted Environmental, Health, and Safety Regulations, describing how the misuse of models has resulted in the proliferation of government regulations based not on actual data but on computer models that in many ways are nothing more than the opinions of the computer programs.

Green also noted that Amazon has refused to make his book available for sale, essentially banning it for no justifiable reason. As he explained to me in an email,

My publisher, who is a start-up small Canadian publisher specializing in public policy books, tried to upload The Plague of Models to Amazon, as he had previously done with half a dozen other books while working at previous institutions as in-house publisher.

This time, unlike his previous experiences, the book was taken down shortly after it was uploaded (and we know the upload process worked, since the book was available briefly for preview, so there was no technical issue with the manuscript file). The publisher got a form-letter email saying that the book had been taken down because it may have violated some (non-specific) Amazon Term of Service. When he sent a note back requesting clarification/appeal, he got another form letter, this one repeating that the book may have violated some term of service, and warning that any attempt to re-upload would get his entire account terminated.
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It is time to devalue the software research of climate models

1:29 pm

When the table of contents of the most recent issue of the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Geophysical Research Letters was released on August 16, 2023, I could not help noticing it contained a string of papers repeatedly showing that the models used to prove the coming fire of global warming continue to remain untrustworthy and unreliable. All of the following papers indicated biases and uncertainties of both climate models as well as the data they used, and each did so in their titles:

All of these papers considered the models valid for future research, and were instead focused on refining and increasing the accuracy of the models. All however showed once again how little we should trust these models.

What makes the publication of these papers significant is that it was the AGU that published them, even though the AGU has a decidedly biased editorial policy in favor of global warming. Despite the AGU’s insistence that “realistic and continually improving computer simulations of the global climate predict that global temperatures will continue to rise as a result of past and future greenhouse gas emissions,” it still cannot avoid publishing papers that repeatedly disprove that conclusion.
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Scientists: Neptune’s clouds appear to ebb and grow in conjunction with sunspot cycle

9:24 am

Graph showing correlation between Neptune's clouds and the sunspot cycle

Scientists have now discovered what appears to be a link between the coming and going of clouds on Neptune to the Sun’s 11-year-long sunspot cycle, despite Neptune receiving only 1/900th the sunlight of the Earth.

To monitor the evolution of Neptune’s appearance, Chavez and her team analyzed images taken from 1994 to 2022 using Keck Observatory’s second generation Near-Infrared Camera (NIRC2) paired with its adaptive optics system (since 2002), as well as observations from Lick Observatory (2018-2019) and the Hubble Space Telescope (since 1994). In recent years the Keck Observatory observations have been complemented by images taken as part of Keck Observatory’s Twilight Observing Program and by Hubble Space Telescope images taken as part of the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program.

The data revealed an intriguing pattern between changes in Neptune’s cloud cover and the solar cycle – the period when the Sun’s magnetic field flips every 11 years, causing levels of solar radiation to fluctuate. When the Sun emits more intense ultraviolet (UV) light, specifically the strong hydrogen Lyman-alpha emission, more clouds appear on Neptune about two years later. The team further found a positive correlation between the number of clouds and the ice giant’s brightness from the sunlight reflecting off it.

“These remarkable data give us the strongest evidence yet that Neptune’s cloud cover correlates with the Sun’s cycle,” said de Pater. “Our findings support the theory that the Sun’s UV rays, when strong enough, may be triggering a photochemical reaction that produces Neptune’s clouds.”

The graph to the right shows the correlation between the clouds and the sunspot cycle. The paper is available here.

This conclusion remains uncertain because of the overall sparseness of the data. Yet, it is intriguing, and also underlines the importance of the Sun on the Earth’s climate. If the solar cycle can impact Neptune’s climate so significantly from 2.8 billion miles away, it certainly must have a major impact on the Earth’s climate at only 100 million miles distance.

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Sunspot update: In July the Sun continued its high sunspot activity

5:05 pm

Today NOAA released its monthly update of its graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. As I have done every month for the entire thirteen years I have been doing this website, I have posted that updated graph below, adding to it some extra details to provide some context.

Though the sunspot count in July was slightly less than the very high numbers in June (the highest seen in more than two decades), the decline was almost inconsequential. Except for June’s activity, the activity in July was still the highest sunspot count in a month since September 2002, when the Sun was just beginning its ramp down after its solar maximum that reached its peak in late 2001. From that time until the last two months, the Sun had been in a very prolonged quiet period, with two solar minimums that were overly long and a single solar maximum that was very weak with a extended double peak lasting almost four years.
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Scientists increasingly put politics over uncertainty in their research papers

10:35 am

The modern scientific method
The modern scientific method

The death of uncertainty in science: According to a paper published this week in the peer-review journal Science, scientists in recent years are increasingly abandoning uncertainty in their research papers and are instead more willing to make claims of absolute certainty without hesitation or even proof.

If this trend holds across the scientific literature, it suggests a worrisome rise of unreliable, exaggerated claims, some observers say. Hedging and avoiding overconfidence “are vital to communicating what one’s data can actually say and what it merely implies,” says Melissa Wheeler, a social psychologist at the Swinburne University of Technology who was not involved in the study. “If academic writing becomes more about the rhetoric … it will become more difficult for readers to decipher what is groundbreaking and truly novel.”

The new analysis, one of the largest of its kind, examined more than 2600 research articles published from 1997 to 2021 in Science, which the team chose because it publishes articles from multiple disciplines. (Science’s news team is independent from the editorial side.) The team searched the papers for about 50 terms such as “could,” “appear to,” “approximately,” and “seem.” The frequency of these hedging words dropped from 115.8 instances per 10,000 words in 1997 to 67.42 per 10,000 words in 2021.

Those numbers represent a 40% decline, a trend that has been clear for decades, first becoming obvious in the climate field. » Read more

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All UN climate models vastly over-estimate warming in the U.S.

2:28 pm

climate models vs observations

According to a direct comparison between actual data and the three-dozen climate models used by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the models all overestimate the warming that has happened, sometimes by ridiculous amounts.

The graph to the right shows “the 50-year area-averaged temperature trend during 1973-2022 for the 12-state corn belt as observed with the official NOAA homogenized surface temperature product (blue bar) versus the same metric from 36 CMIP6 climate models [red bars].”

This story isn’t new, and in fact to me has become somewhat boring because the results are always the same. The computer models that global warming climate scientists have pushed at us for decades have been consistently wrong. They routinely have over-predicted the amount of warming. Since such models are expressly designed to provide us reliable predictions, and these models are not reliable or correct, I find it absurd to pay any attention to them.

At the same time, this repeated and continuing failure needs to be mentioned periodically, because politicians and climate warming activists (I repeat myself) continue to ignore this failure as they wave these models around like red flags that must to be obeyed. Not only should these models be ignored, our governments and science community should stop funding these people. Their work is a failure. They don’t deserve further grants.

Let me add one more important note: The observations show an increase of about 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. This increase is almost a rounding number, considering the amount of random fluctuations that is routinely seen in the global climate temperature. Even if the trend was extended for a century (something that is not guaranteed at all), the increase would still be only two degrees, hardly a worry.

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SpaceX and FAA seek dismissal of lawsuit against Starship at Boca Chica

9:01 am

Both the FAA and SpaceX have now submitted their response to the lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and other environmental and leftist political groups, requesting a dismissal of their lawsuit demanding no more launches at Boca Chica until the federal government completes a new environmental impact statement.

In a filing Friday, the FAA said the groups lack legal standing for their claims against the agency that granted a launch license to SpaceX’s Starship rocket program. Separately, a SpaceX filing said the first Starship launch on April 20 provided no cause for the FAA to conduct a new environmental assessment, a process that could halt further test launches for years. “For the foregoing reasons, defendants request that the court dismiss the complaint in its entirety,” Todd Kim, assistant attorney general for the environment and natural resources division of the U.S. Department of Justice, wrote in the filing in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

In a sane world, this lawsuit would have been thrown out of court almost instantly. There is no evidence the test launch of Starship/Superheavy caused any environmental damage. Furthermore, launches from Cape Canaveral for the past seven decades have proven this fact repeatedly.

We no longer live in a sane world. There is no guarantee the court will rule in favor of the FAA or SpaceX.

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Sunspot update: June saw the most sunspots in more than two decades

8:47 pm

Time for our monthly sunspot update, based on NOAA’s monthly graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. I have posted that graph below, but have added some extra details to provide some context.

June saw the highest sunspot count in a month since September 2002, when the Sun was just beginning its ramp down after its solar maximum that reached its peak in late 2001. From that time until now, the Sun has been in a very prolonged quiet period, with two solar minimums that were overly long and a single solar maximum that was very weak with a extended double peak lasting almost four years.
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Greta Thunberg: All humanity is now extinct on Earth, because we didn’t do anything about global warming

12:40 pm

Greta Thunberg speaks!
Greta Thunberg speaks!

How dare you! On June 21, 2018, Greta Thunberg informed us — as shown in her tweet to the right — that we only had five years left to stop using fossil fuels, and if we didn’t “climate change will wipe out all of humanity.”

I am hardly the only person to note this example of global warming fraudulence. Numerous reporters have also gleefully noted it, with this essay today at American Thinker by Andrea Widburg probably the most damning, not so much for noting the ignorant rantings of this uneducated high school drop-out whom the left made their icon of knowledge and top global warming expert, but for the list she provides of the endless number of other failed doomsday predictions by global warming activists and politicians.

That list was compiled in 2019, and thus it did not yet include Thunberg’s absurd prediction. Nor did it include the endless string of additional false doomsday predictions that this crowd has continued to issue in the years since, all of which I guarantee without any uncertainty will all fail, just as their hundreds of past doomsday predictions have failed.

You see, the point of those predictions was not to educate, but to instill fear, so as to then justify a power grab by the government. As Widburg concludes:
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Sunspot update: May activity once again far above prediction

5:06 pm

With the start of the month it is time once again for our monthly sunspot update, based on the new data that NOAA today added to its own monthly graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. I have posted that graph below, but have added some extra details to provide some context.

In May the number of sunspots zipped upward again, ending up at the second highest monthly count during this ramp up to solar maximum, and the second highest count since the last solar maximum in 2014.
» Read more

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SpaceX files to join FAA as defendant in lawsuit trying to shut down Boca Chica

9:01 am

SpaceX on May 19, 2023 submitted a motion to become a defendant in the lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and others that demands its Starship/Superheavy launchsite at Boca Chica be shut down.

“SpaceX’s Starship/Super Heavy launch program hinges on the FAA’s review and licensing decision challenged here. If the Court were to rule in Plaintiffs’ favor, the FAA’s decision could be set aside, and further licensing of the Starship/Super Heavy Program could be significantly delayed, causing severe injury to SpaceX’s business,” the company said in the motion, which was filed on May 19.

The full motion can be read here [pdf].

SpaceX’s motion notes that it has followed all government regulations in the decade since it established its Boca Chica launch site, and invested more than $3 billion in doing so. The motion points out that “the FAA does not adequately represent SpaceX’s interests” and that the company must participate because the lawsuit will have direct financial impact on its business.

In other words, the big guns are now being hauled out against this lawsuit, which on its face is somewhat weak. We shall see if it can withstand the much more aggressive fight that SpaceX is certain to put up.

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Rocket Lab successfully launches two NASA hurricane monitoring cubesats

6:11 pm

Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket today successfully placed NASA’s two Tropics hurricane monitoring cubesats into orbit, lifting off from New Zealand ((May 8th New Zealand time).

This is the first of two Rocket Lab launches to get the entire four-satellite Tropics constellation into orbit, with the second schedule for two weeks from now.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

29 SpaceX
16 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China 33 to 16 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 33 to 28.

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Sunspot update: April activity drops steeply

2:19 pm

NOAA this week once again published an update of its monthly graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. As I do every month, I have posted this graph below, with some additional details included to provide some context.

In April the number of sunspots dropped again, for the second time in the past three months. The high activity previously had suggested that the solar maximum was going to be much higher than predicted, or possibly would come sooner than expected. The drop however now suggests that the fast rise in sunspot activity that we have seen since the beginning of the ramp up to solar maximum in 2020 might finally be abating.
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If global warming doesn’t kill us the fog will!

11:01 am

Shipping routes
Illustration showing the distance and time saved by going north
through the Arctic Ocean

A new report published by the American Geophysical Union, and touted by it though a press release today, says that while the melting Arctic Ocean icecap — caused by human-caused global warming — will make shipping more convenient, that shipping will be hindered by increased fog — caused by human-caused warming.

Arctic sea ice has been shrinking for decades. That loss has opened shipping channels in the Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea Route, allowing even non-icebreaker vessels to skip the time-consuming Panama and Suez Canals farther south. But as the ice recedes, cold air is exposed to more warm water, and warm vapor condenses into fog in those new passages. Hidden chunks of ice already pose risks to vessels making their way through foggy, low-visibility routes.
» Read more

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Scientists predict solar maximum to arrive one year early

9:39 am

The scientists whose prediction of a more active upcoming solar maximum that has so far turned out more accurate than the consensus prediction have now updated their prediction, lowering it somewhat but also predicting the maximum will occur one year early, in 2024 instead of 2025.

The team’s finalized forecast for the current cycle expects it to peak in late 2024, one year earlier than NASA and NOAA had predicted. The cycle, the team thinks, will reach about 185 monthly sunspots during its maximum and thus be somewhat milder than what the team originally forecasted. This peak intensity will place this cycle at about the average compared to the historical record.

In other words, now that we are about halfway to maximum, they have concluded that while NOAA’s prediction was too low, their prediction was too high. They have now adjusted their expectations to be closer to what they now think will happen.

A short solar cycle however has historically corresponded to much higher sunspot activity. If this new prediction is correct (a short cycle with a mild maximum), it will mean that the Sun is still behaving in ways that the solar science community does not understand, or can predict.

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Watching the launch of Starship/Superheavy

10:08 pm

Starship/Superheavy flight plan for first orbital flight
Click for original image.

UPDATE: Launch scrubbed. To get to new links for watching the live stream in the second launch attempt, now scheduled for April 20, 2023, go here.

Original post:
————-
The first orbital test launch of SpaceX’s massive Superheavy first stage with its orbital Starship spacecraft stacked on top is now scheduled for a launch in a two-and-a-half hour long launch window beginning at 8 am (Central) on Monday, April 17, 2023.

I have embedded SpaceX’s live stream of that launch below, which will begin around 7 am (Central). You can also see an independent 24/7 live stream from LabPadre, showing the launchpad from many different angles and available here. NasaSpaceFlight.com also has a 24/7 live stream showing multiple angles here. Though both of these independent live streams provide alternative view angles of the launch, both will rely on SpaceX’s main live stream, embedded below, for actual updates on the countdown status.

If the launch is scrubbed on April 17th, SpacX has backup dates on April 18th and 19th. The flight plan and time line is shown in the graphic above.

The monumental significance of this rocket cannot be overstated. It is the most powerful rocket ever built, capable of putting more mass into orbit than either the Saturn-5 or NASA’s new SLS rocket.

It took less than seven years from concept to launch. Compare that to SLS, which was proposed in 2004 and only launched last year, two decades later.

It has been been entirely developed with private funds. Though SpaceX does have a NASA contract for building a Starship lunar lander, little of that contract’s funds have yet been distributed to the company. From private funds SpaceX has raised about $10 billion, most of which has been channeled into this rocket’s development, with a small unknown amount used to develop Starlink. Compare that once again to SLS, which has cost about $60 billion to build.

Finally, it is being designed to be completely reusable, thus reducing the cost exponentially for putting large 100-ton payloads into orbit. If successful, Starship/Superheavy will very quickly make the human exploration and colonization of the solar system possible.

And it will do so not as a government project that is part of a government program, but as a private sector product, conceived by individual Americans freely following their dreams, and developed for profit, quickly and efficiently.

Let freedom ring!
» Read more

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Sunspot update: Activity remained high in March

12:35 pm

It is time for my monthly sunspot update. NOAA this week updated its graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. This graph is posted below, with some additional details included to provide some context.

Last month the number of sunspots dipped slightly after a gigantic leap of activity in January. This month showed a small rise in activity, but not enough to bring levels back to the January’s levels. Nonetheless, activity remains the highest seen since 2014. when the last solar maximum was approaching its end, and continues to exceed significantly the 2020 prediction by NOAA’s panel of solar scientists.
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Sunspot update: After going through the roof last month, sunspots drop into the attic this month

11:05 am

With the start of another month NOAA this week updated its graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. As I do every month, I have posted that updated graph below, adding some additional details to provide some context.

Last month the number of sunspots rocketed upward to the highest seen since 2014, and only the second time since November 2002 that the Sun was that active. In February those high numbers dropped, though the sunspot activity during the month remained well above the 2020 prediction by NOAA’s panel of solar scientists.

» Read more

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Sunspot update: Sunspots in January went through the roof!

2:07 pm

NOAA this week updated its monthly graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. Below is that updated graph, with January’s numbers added to the timeline. As I have done monthly for the past dozen years here on Behind the Black, I have added some additional details to that graph to provide context.

Just as in December, the number of sunspots in January 2023 shot up to the highest amount since September 2014, which was during the previous solar maximum. Unlike December, however, January’s numbers came only a hairs-breath from topping that 2014 number. In fact, except for that one 2014 month, January 2023 saw the most sunspots on the Sun since November 2002, twenty years ago. In 2002 the Sun was ramping down from what had been a relatively strong double-peaked solar maximum, and was about to begin an extremely long period of little or no activity, followed by a very weak double-peaked solar maximum in 2013.

That period of little activity also corresponded with a long twenty-year period in which the Earth’s climate appeared to stop warming.
» Read more

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Sunspot update: The most sunspots since 2014

9:26 am

Time for my monthly sunspot update, based on NOAA’s monthly graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. The newest graph, with December’s numbers added to the timeline, is below. As always, I have added some additional details to provide context.

In December the half-year pause in the ramp up to solar maximum ceased, with the Sun seeing the most sunspots since September 2014. This high activity far exceeded the predicted sunspot count for December 2023, almost doubling it. In fact, December’s sunspot count almost equaled the predicted peak for the upcoming solar maximum, which is not supposed to happen until sometime in 2025.

» Read more

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NASA loses contact with one hurricane satellite in constellation of eight

10:36 am

NASA has lost contact with one of the eight CYGNSS satellites it uses to track and measure hurricanes worldwide.

The remaining seven satellites that comprise the CYGNSS constellation remain operational and have continued collecting scientific data since FM06 went incommunicado last month, according to NASA’s primary statement about the incident. The constellation’s science work can continue without FM06, but if the team can’t reconnect with the spacecraft, the loss will reduce the spatial coverage of CYGNSS, which until November provided nearly gap-free coverage of Earth.

At the moment engineers do not know why contact was lost, or if they can regain it.

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SpaceX launches oceanography satellite

8:57 am

SpaceX early this morning used its Falcon 9 rocket to successfully launch an oceanography satellite, dubbed SWOT, for both NASA and France’s space agency CNES.

The satellite it designed to measure the height of water on 90% of the Earth’s surface.

The first stage was making its sixth flight, and successfully returned to Earth, touching down on its landing pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

59 China
57 SpaceX
21 Russia
9 Rocket Lab
8 ULA

The U.S. now leads China 81 to 59 in the national rankings, but trails the entire world combined 91 to 81.

These numbers however should change again later today, as SpaceX has another launch scheduled.

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NOAA once again over-predicts the hurricane count

12:22 pm

As it has done repeatedly in recent years, NOAA in 2022 once again over-predicted the hurricane count for this past hurricane season, predicting an above-normal season when it actually ended up to be well below-normal.

In late May and again in early August 2022 NOAA predicted that the year 2022 Atlantic Hurricane Season (between June to end November calendar period) would be an “above normal” season with 14-21 named storms, between 6-10 hurricanes including 3-6 major hurricanes (Category 3,4 and 5) as shown in NOAA’s diagram below.

Colorado State University’s Department of Atmospheric Science/Tropical Meteorology Project has compiled the year 2022 tropical storm data, establishing that, compared to its 30 year North Atlantic data records covering the Climatological period 1991-2020, the year 2022 hurricane season was below average in Named Storms, Named Storm Days, Hurricane Days, Major Hurricanes, Major Hurricane Days and Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE).

The many graphs at the link also demonstrate that the predictions that there will be an increase in extreme weather events due to increased use of fossil fuels is also proving false.

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Sunspot update: The Sun’s unprecedented pause to maximum continues

9:44 am

It is the beginning of the month, and NOAA has once again published its update of its monthly graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. Below is the newest graph, adding November’s numbers to the timeline and annotated by me with some additional details added to provide context.

Sunspot activity dropped in November, though still remained significantly higher than the prediction, a sunspot number of 77.6 compared to the predicted number of 57.4. At 77.6, the Sun continues the pause that began in June in the ramp up to solar maximum. For the past half year the Sun’s sunspot output has essentially stalled at approximately the same level.

» Read more

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Not one climate model predicts global temperature; all predict too much warming

1:27 pm

Climate models versus actual observations for the past 50 years

Even as we wait for the final results in numerous elections yesterday, I thought I would throw the chart to the right out for my readers to digest.

The chart was created by climate scientist Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, who has also been one of the principal investigators for one of NASA climate satellites.

As seen in the accompanying plot, 50-year (1973-2022) summer (June/July/August) temperature trends for the contiguous 48 U.S. states from 36 CMIP-6 climate model experiments average nearly twice the warming rate as observed by the NOAA climate division dataset.

…The official NOAA observations produce a 50-year summer temperature trend of +0.26 C/decade for the U.S., while the model trends range from +0.28 to +0.71 C/decade.

Not one climate model predicted the actual global temperature for the past half century. All predicted too much warming, with about half the models predicting twice as much warming as actually occurred.

In other words, the models continue to express opinion, not science. To rely on any model for establishing climate policy is not only foolish, it is downright irresponsible.

But don’t worry. Joe Biden and the Democrats are on their game, and will shut down all fossil fuel energy sources, because it simply feels right to them.

Meanwhile, on a related side note, the fact that it is no longer possible to finish counting the votes on election day — something that Americans did routinely for more than two centuries long before computers — either is another sign that serious election tampering is going on, or is a clear demonstration that we have entered the new dark age, where it will no longer be possible to accomplish some of the most basic tasks of a true civilization.

In either case, the barbarians rule, and we all suffer because of it.

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Sunspot update: The pause in the ramp up to solar maximum continues

11:34 am

NOAA has once again published its monthly update of its monthly graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. Below is that November graph, annotated by me with some additional details added to provide context.

Though sunspot number continued to be much higher than the prediction (almost double), October saw almost exactly the same number of sunspots as seen in September, which is why this new graph seems almost identical to last month’s.

In other words, the pause in the ramp up to solar maximum, first noted in August, continues.
» Read more

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Sunspot update: Activity again exceeds prediction but ramp up pauses

11:29 pm

NOAA this weekend published, as it does at the start of every month, its October update of its monthly graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. As I have done since I started this website in 2011, I have published that graph below, with some additional details added to provide context.

An increase in sunspot activity in September wiped out the decline seen in August, so that the sunspot number in September once again matched or exceeded the numbers seen during the middle of the previous solar maximum from 2012 to 2014, a low period of activity between that maximum’s two peaks. Activity also continued to exceed the predictions of the panel of government solar scientists put together by NOAA.

At the same time, since May the ramp up to maximum has stalled, something I noted last month and has now become more evident.
» Read more

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Sunspot update: Solar activity continues to exceed sunspot predictions

3:50 pm

It is the beginning of September and time to post another update on the Sun’s ongoing solar cycle. Below is NOAA’s monthly graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere, with the activity in August now added. I have also added some additional details to the graph to give the numbers a larger context.

Though sunspot activity dropped in August it remained significantly above the predictions of the panel of government solar scientists put together by NOAA. The predicted sunspot number for August, as indicated by the red curve, was supposed to be about 48. The actual number was 75.

» Read more

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Sunspot update: Activity recovers mostly from last month’s decline

9:04 pm

It is the start of the month, and thus time to post NOAA’s monthly update of its graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. That graph is below, with some additional details added by me to provide a larger context.

After the first real decline in sunspot activity in June, the Sun recovered that decline almost completely in July. Though the ramp up to solar maximum has stalled somewhat in the last two months, the trend continues to point to a very active maximum, much higher than predicted as well as much stronger than the last very weak maximum in 2020.

» Read more

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Sunspot update: For the first time in 2022, sunspot activity eases

3:58 pm

With the year half over, the Sun in June did something it had not done since the start of the year: The number of sunspots seen daily on the Sun’s visible hemisphere actually declined from the month before.

I know this because, as I do every month, I have posted below NOAA’s monthly update of its graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere, with some addition details added to provide a larger context.

» Read more

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