Rally,
you are suggesting I am cherry picking and I am doing nothing of the sort. You seem to have miss read my post and decided I was saying the data from the last 50 years is definitive and that is not what I was saying. The observations of the Sun are more accurate for the last 50 years but the base line is not long enough to make any declarations. Of course looking at the long term can give a clearer picture but again not definitive. Many solar physicists think the idea that there are cycles within cycles as being a reality and that is what I was suggesting in the second paragraph. It's worth looking at some of the links to papers on the NASA site regarding meridional flow and gauss strength of sunspot numbers. The speculation amongst the scientists suggests there maybe one further cycle before a minimum starts or other scientists speculate this is just the start of another 100 year cycle. I highlighted the butterfly diagram to show a comparison between the 1906 maximum and the cycle 24, they have a similar appearance and hence this may be right. This might suggest that there is just another larger cycle starting. The sunspot numbers are the only long term data we have but without the space observatory data it is again limited to telling us as to what is going on within the Sun.
Sunspot numbers are one thing but only in the last 60 or so years have we had better observational tools. Space observatories are opening up better understandings of what lies beneath the solar surface and deep within the Sun. Like I said, there is still much to be learnt to understand what is going on. As pointed out the correlation between the Maunder Minimum and the mini ice age has been disputed with more probably causes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rally
Paul,
The reason the sunspot numbers have been "dropping" over the last 50 years is because roughly 60 years ago we had the the highest recorded annual peak since 1700 !
So, yes I guess its all downhill since then !
The relevance of it returning to "normal" is what ? - That its "Normal" or that its "Dropping" ?
But if you compared the last 50 years with what occurred 100 years ago you could then say that we now have roughly double the sunspots from that time !
Obviously man induced Global Warming - Im joking of course
This is obviously cherry picking the data and drawing any conclusions like these is meaningless misinformation.
If you look at the long term annual sunspot data you can see the cycles and see that the last 50 years is pretty ordinary and represents little variation to what has happened before (in fact quite similar to a similar period around 200 years ago) - what we can see is there is quite a lot of variation over time that probably indicates there is more going on inside the sun and given there is only a record of not quite 30 cycles since 1700 - we simply dont have a lot of data to truly analyse the internal cyclic nature of all that is going on inside the Sun.
jpg attached of chart showing annual sunspots since 1700
Graph X axis at ) actually represents 1700.
Data from reliable source - http://sidc.oma.be/silso/datafiles
Picture tells a 1000 words here - everyone can draw their own conclusions.
Rally |