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Solar Cycle 25 has already "started".


theartist

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[EXPLANATORY STATEMENT:  Based on comments observed elsewhere on the Internet, there is some confusion as to what the "Start" of a solar cycle is.  That is scientifically defined as the previous solar cycle's minimum (i.e., nadir) value of the Smoothed Monthly International Sunspot Number; the computation of that value is explained further here: http://www.sidc.be/silso/node/52.  Sometimes, the "onset" of a solar cycle is confused with the "start" of the cycle; the former is generally defined as to when solar activity in the cycle starts to pick up 'in significance' (and that does not have definitive parameters, depending on the source), whereas, the "start" is an absolutely, scientifically defined value.]

 

Solar Cycle 25 has already "started", at least, that is my conclusion according to a metric I uncovered in the 'Bremen Composite MG II, Index Time Series'http://lasp.colorado.edu/lisird/data/bremen_composite_mgii/.

For now, I refer to this metric as the "Bremen Metric", and I reveal it in the following video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7H7vnIIWpQ

Here is a compressed version of that video:

 

The ”Bremen Metric” I uncovered does not actually indicate in which specific month that “solar minimum” (i.e., the official ’Start’ of the next solar cycle, as defined by the 'Belgium sunspot counters') occurred. It just informs us that it has already passed. The ”Bremen Metric” indicates that the 'Belgium sunspot counters' will eventually conclude (through their calculation of the weighted-smoothing-average of monthly sunspots) that the ’Start’ of SC25 happened in or before the month of January 2019. [Note, to be completely fair to the ”Bremen Metric”, one would actually need to do a more precise plot of the smoothed-average data I show in my video. It might be more accurate, when using the ”Bremen Metric”, to say that the ’Start’ of the next cycle happens in or before a 1-3 month period centered around the point I show on the graph at 2min10sec of my video (EDIT: @1:55 of the compressed video). Thus, that would mean the 'Belgium sunspot counters' will eventually conclude (through their calculation) that the ’Start’ of SC25 happened in or before a period defined as mid-November 2018 to mid-February 2019.]

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One way we can compare the characteristics of solar minimums is to simply look at their respective "Smoothed minimum ISN", and that value is provided in the third column of the chart found in the List_of_solar_cycles Wikipedia article. Below are the numbers going back to the end of Cycle 19:

Minimum between........Date of Minimum............Smoothed minimum ISN

SC 19/20.........................1964 October..............................14.3

SC 20/21..........................1976 March................................17.8

SC 21/22........................1986 September...........................13.5

SC 22/23..........................1996 August...............................11.2

SC 23/24..........................2008 December...........................2.2

SC 24/25........................(to be determined)...........(6.6 as of Apr 2019)*

* 6.6 is computed for 2018 August; 6.1 is projected for 2019 January. These two values were garnered from the table titled "Monthly solar cycle data" found at    http://www.solen.info/solar/    .

We can see from the above data that if the SC 24/25 transition has already occurred, the current minimum period, based on this simple metric, is less-active than four of the previous five cycles.

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46 minutes ago, Vancanneyt Sander said:

 The "Belgian sunspot counters" of the SIDC predicted the minimum to occur between July 2019 and September 2020. 

"Given the previous minimum in December 2008, this thus corresponds to a duration for cycle 24 between 10.6 and 11.75 years. This thus also means that the activity is expected to decline further over the coming months."  http://sidc.be/silso/node/152

However, we know that a 'full-cycle' (pertaining to the solar magnetic dynamo) is actually ~22 years in duration. Thus, simply adding 22 years to the previous full-cycle minimum in September 1986 projects the latest minimum to November 2018.   Interesting, eh?  🙂

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I peeked back over here this morning, and looking at my last statement above, I'm not sure how I came up with "November of 2018"?  😜 That should have read "September 2018" (from simply adding 22 years to September 1986).  I apologize Sander Vancanneyt for any confusion that gaffe caused.  😑

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We’ll see who’s right :P 

do note this quote of j. Janssens: “The timing is mostly determined by the strength of the new cycle: more active cycles tend to start their rise earlier”

if we take current sc25 prediction into account, I don’t think sc25 has started. I would be glad if it didn’t take as long as previous solar minimum 😫

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🥴I guess my mistakes are being put out there to see if anybody (including me?☺️) is awake here.  Let's try this again.  The last minimum ~22 years ago was MAY 1996. Thus, simply adding 22 years to that value means the SC 24/25 minimum was due in MAY 2018.  That means we are way overdue! 😳 It is already in the past by that metric.  🤪

 

Let's see what the July 2019 round of sunspots look like.  😎

 

Above I said "MAY 1996", using the SC22 minimum displayed in the following chart, which was found at the j.janssens link http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/Engzonnecyclus.html#Ohl:

1319758723_ScreenShot2019-06-19at7_08_56PM.thumb.png.93614d1066fc5b6e4fc7169d35059f41.png

 

However, the wikipedia chart on solar cycles lists the Start of SC23 as AUGUST 1996 in the following chart found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_cycles

450218350_ScreenShot2019-06-19at7_10_06PM.thumb.png.86fa456a71077b64f4610e67106d57dd.png

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11 uren geleden, theartist zei:

Thus, simply adding 22 years to that value means the SC 24/25 minimum was due in MAY 2018

no cycle has an exact 11 year duration so just adding 22 years would be too easy :P 

PS.: wikipedia can always have mistakes in their articles... it already states 401 spotless days in SC25 :D 

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On 6/20/2019 at 5:54 AM, Vancanneyt Sander said:

PS.: wikipedia can always have mistakes in their articles... it already states 401 spotless days in SC25 :D 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the minimums (i.e., cycle "Start") in the first chart are based on the 'Meeus smoothing formula', whereas, the Wikipedia chart used the 'SIDC smoothing formula'.  The spotless days are probably being provided by these folks:  http://www.sidc.be/silso/spotless .  They start counting spotless days for the next cycle after the Maximum in the previous cycle.

Here is their chart of the Number of spotless days vs. Solar Cycle amplitude:

SC25_SCvsNumber.thumb.png.c7471e302dd2aad7906e9dbc6ef15790.png

Upon review of that chart, I dispelled the myth that we are plunging into a "mini-ice age" anytime soon as a result of contemporary solar cycle activity (i.e., apart from any anthropogenic activity that might drastically alter the weather/climate), which was the subject of the following video 😁:

 

 

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23 uren geleden, theartist zei:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the minimums (i.e., cycle "Start") in the first chart are based on the 'Meeus smoothing formula', whereas, the Wikipedia chart used the 'SIDC smoothing formula'.

There was indeed corrections made to the historic sunspot numbers, details can be found here: http://www.sidc.be/silso/newdataset 

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On 6/19/2019 at 4:26 PM, Vancanneyt Sander said:

I would be glad if it didn’t take as long as previous solar minimum 😫

I took a look at the last 10 solar cycle minimum periods, in order to evaluate whether or not it is abnormal to have already passed the Start of SC25, and that is the subject of a video I posted today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-KZXrhsAg4

Here is a compressed version of that video:

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14 hours ago, Vancanneyt Sander said:

Both new regions are still from old cycle, if we where past minimum, we would see more SC25 regions appear and that's not the case yet. Still old SC24 regions emerge so it still looks that the minimum has yet to come. 

But did you look at the slides in my recent youtube video (titled "Solar Minimum Comparison", Published on Jun 24, 2019) carefully enough to see that it is not at all atypical for the longest string of spotless days to occur AFTER solar minimum had passed? Sometimes, the 'Longest String of Spotless Days' (LSSD) during solar minimum period happens many months after the Solar Minimum Nadir has already passed.   For example, look at these:

Solar Cycle 16, LSSD occurred 8-9 months after the first (of two🙂) Cycle "Starts"

SC16.thumb.png.fc47fae97d49d894986f938b2115ef81.png

 

Solar Cycle 21, LSSD occurred 4-5 months after the Cycle "Start"

SC21.thumb.png.22fd08fa2a11962d9a2494d754a82ecc.png

 

Solar Cycle 23, LSSD occurred 3-4 months after the first (of two🙂) Cycle "Starts" 

SC23.thumb.png.ea3adc938eb44320f371dd251e7e08cf.png

 

Solar Cycle 24, LSSD occurred 7-8 months after the Cycle "Start"

SC24.thumb.png.9488baf752db007bb3513c0717c08db6.png

 

 

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I did look but it's still in my opionion mostly guesswork and time will tell who was right 😉 . As long as the scientist don't know the exact inner workings of the Sun, the predictions of solar minimum and maximum will be very variable. Before the previous minimum there where a lot of different oppinions of many scientists and it turned out that half wasn't right. Let's evaluate in 6 months where we are 😉 

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1 hour ago, Vancanneyt Sander said:

I did look but it's still in my opionion mostly guesswork and time will tell who was right 😉 . 

We do have some historical precedent, but we need to at least look at what little evidence we have objectively.  

On 6/25/2019 at 5:44 AM, Vancanneyt Sander said:

Both new regions are still from old cycle, if we where past minimum, we would see more SC25 regions appear and that's not the case yet. 

Do you have the data (a source) for trying to quantify past cycle patterns on this idea that we would be seeing more 'next cycle' regions?  We can eyeball the butterfly diagram...but all those points on that diagram do not actually represent a "region", right?  Where is the data behind that diagram, anyway?

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On 6/26/2019 at 7:06 AM, theartist said:

We can eyeball the butterfly diagram...but all those points on that diagram do not actually represent a "region", right?

Let me try to explain further what I'm suggesting.  Consider the following two images of an area in the Northern Hemisphere at high latitude on the solar disk today:2113326166_3wavelengths.png.4033908467e768a7b4a69d768258b4cb.png

479024709_HMIColorizedMagnetogram.thumb.png.2657fcf00754d97da7b1f96df81e70df.png

That area is obviously putting out magnetic field perturbation...and if it actually produced sunspots, they would quite likely be put in the camp of SC25, considering their very high latitude.  Now although they are not producing spots, we've already had a lot of these type of SC25 areas emerge over the last few months, agree?  So even though this type of production is not recognized as SC25 'spots', does such an area still possess the attributes that would eventually get put into a 'Butterfly Diagram'?

Here is another today, but in the Southern Hemisphere:

93685822_SouthernHemisphere.png.2377253209afc76e2a2019d424fbe2cc.png

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The butterfly diagram gives the sunspot regions latitude in the y and time in the x axis. Where sc24 fade out more and more sc25 regions would take over. I didn’t find an updated chart 😕 (most recent is that of Jan Janssens of February 2019)

The images with a brighter zone is not a zone where a region would appear, latitude seems too high too. Just some granules of the Sun, nothing fancy. I guess HMI didn’t give anything for that place either? 

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3 hours ago, Vancanneyt Sander said:

The images with a brighter zone is not a zone where a region would appear,

Sorry, but I disagree on this one, unless you explain what you mean better.🤔 The reason I sometimes find new spots so fast, is because a lot of times before a spot eventually breaks through on the photosphere, a magnetic perturbation will first start out manifesting bright spots up in the chromosphere like that.  Of course, not all bright zones will eventually have a spot associated with them.  But yes, that's something anyone can see with their own eyes if they get familiar with watching SDO long enough.🙂

(Thank you and please keep chiming in. No human has all this figured out yet, but we grow in knowledge by humbly comparing notes.😊 This in no way means I claim to be at your stature of knowledge in this field.  After all, it is just a side-interest of mine, and I hardly knew anything about it until I got a bit interested sometime last year.)

Here is some more info on the Butterfly Diagram. Evidently, Hathaway was active with assimilating Royal Observatory data (source https://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml)(https://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/greenwch.shtml).

The Butterfly Diagram

thumbnail of butterfly diagram

Click on image for larger version.

Detailed observations of sunspots have been obtained by the Royal Greenwich Observatory since 1874. These observations include information on the sizes and positions of sunspots as well as their numbers. These data show that sunspots do not appear at random over the surface of the sun but are concentrated in two latitude bands on either side of the equator. A butterfly diagram (142 kb GIF image) (184 kb pdf-file) (updated monthly) showing the positions of the spots for each rotation of the sun since May 1874 shows that these bands first form at mid-latitudes, widen, and then move toward the equator as each cycle progresses.

 

 

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12 uren geleden, theartist zei:

Sorry, but I disagree on this one, unless you explain what you mean better.🤔 The reason I sometimes find new spots so fast, is because a lot of times before a spot eventually breaks through on the photosphere, a magnetic perturbation will first start out manifesting bright spots up in the chromosphere like that.  Of course, not all bright zones will eventually have a spot associated with them.  But yes, that's something anyone can see with their own eyes if they get familiar with watching SDO long enough.

New spots are only defined if they are visible in white light or on the HMI instrument of SDO, not before. If the spot(s) still exist after 00:00 midnight a new region number is officially assigned.In the cases above, there was no visible spot in white light and/or HMI instrument.

The butterfly diagram you posted is an older one than the one J. Janssens has and is a bit more detailed 😉 

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Yes, I understand and was agreeing with what you said previously (and just now) about when a spot that actually shows up on HMI gets counted.  And I was not disagreeing (but I wasn't sure either) with your statement that,

15 hours ago, Vancanneyt Sander said:

latitude seems too high too

Maybe I didn't explain myself very well, but I was specifically addressing what you said about "bright zones are not areas that produce spots...Just some granules of the Sun, nothing fancy."  Maybe I'm pointing out a new concept that I don't think has been mentioned on here until now.  My first image was a composite of three wavelengths: 304A (typically colorized in red, emitted from the Transition Region/Chromasphere), 211A(typically colorized in purple, showing hotter, magnetically Active Regions in the sun's corona), and 171A(typically colorized in gold, from the Upper Transition Region, showing the quiet corona and coronal loops). Those "Bright Zones" can indeed manifest without a sunspot or (officially recognized and numbered) Active Region underneath them; but they sometimes (not the majority of times) do eventually produce an Active Region down at the photosphere with a sunspot under them.

https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/how-sdo-sees-the-sun

1 hour ago, Vancanneyt Sander said:

The butterfly diagram you posted is an older one than the one J. Janssens has and is a bit more detailed 😉 

Thank you!  I haven't had a chance to get to that yet.

15 hours ago, Vancanneyt Sander said:

The butterfly diagram gives the sunspot regions latitude

Now this statement above, IF it is true that ONLY sunspot regions are put on the Butterfly Diagram (BD), did indeed answer what was at the heart of my original question.  Or, is it the case that some non-sunspot, but magnetically active "Bright Zones" get put on the BD, whether it is Hathaway's or J. Janssens BD

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What I meant with "latitude seems too high" is that new cycle spots mostly appear around 40° latitude, the latitudes you had in your pictures was higher and thus not very plausible that regions would start appear there. 

I found an other diagram with pretty recent data: 

f2_li.png

Also a very good research study on the solar cycle: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227138551_Long-Term_Solar_Cycle_Evolution_Review_of_Recent_Developments

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Thank you, thank you! Yes, Figure 2 from that reference would indicate that it is time to start seeing higher latitude sunspots if we are at minimum (the vertical lines in the figure):

The-Maunder-butterfly-diagram-of-sunspots-for-cycles-20-21-Vertical-lines-denote-the.png.b8def54983a7b289b8c3b793f8fcfda7.png

However, look at all of the spots, in general, whether new-cycle or old-cycle, up and down those vertical lines!  We are currently in a much less-active solar environment now. Indeed, seeing all those spots on the Butterfly Diagram around the minima in past solar cycles led me to question if some of them were just 'magnetic perturbations' stuck on there, rather than true sunspots. 😁

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I know I'm saying that in jest, but some historical Butterfly-Diagrams seem to have more dots on them than others, so it would be nice to have open access to the source data.  😊

I wasn't able to find J. Janssens' Butterfly-Diagram, but he puts out good product; must be a labor of love if it's his hobby.🤗

There are also a few other groups that belonged to the new cycle, but they were so small and short-lived they did not get a NOAA number and do not show up in this diagram. 

http://www.stce.be/news/436/welcome.html

Maybe in many years past, these types of sunspots were still making it onto a Butterfly-Diagram? Maybe this is something to consider when reviewing historical Butterfly-Diagrams. 🤔

Some 'old-cycle' sunspots showed up on the disk today.😎

2114596685_ScreenShot2019-06-28at1_30_53PM.thumb.png.041336935603e45050b0101a8055c52f.png

Wow, look what else just showed up.  I'm not going to say this one belongs in 'old-cycle' 24. 😁

1776595952_ScreenShot2019-06-28at2_47_33PM.png.190839859234ac8dfc67bbc50897666e.png

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Haven't checked but if this group has a reverse polarity compared to SC24 groups in the same hemisphere that combined with the fact is is at a high latitude it could very well be a group that belongs to SC25. It does not mean SC25 has started as SC24 and SC25 groups will continue to appear even if SC25 starts but its always nice to see signs of SC25. All I am hoping for is a short minimum that would increase the chances of SC25 being stronger than SC24.

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