“Sunspots may vanish by 2015″

Watts Up With That? (Anthony Watts): Livingston and Penn paper: "Sunspots may vanish by 2015"

From the “I hope to God they are flat wrong department”, here is the abstract of a short paper on recent solar trends by William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson. …

…Here is the complete paper, and below are some excerpts:

Abstract: We have observed spectroscopic changes in temperature sensitive molecular lines, in the magnetic splitting of an Fe I line, and in the continuum brightness of over 1000 sunspot umbrae from 1990-2005. All three measurements show consistent trends in which the darkest parts of the sunspot umbra have become warmer (45K per year) and their magnetic field strengths have decreased (77 Gauss per year), independently of the normal 11-year sunspot cycle. A linear extrapolation of these trends suggests that few sunspots will be visible after 2015. …

…Let us all hope that they are wrong, for a solar epoch period like the Maunder Minimum inducing a Little Ice Age will be a worldwide catastrophe economically, socially, environmentally, and morally.

I’m still very much concerned about the apparent step change in 2005 to a lower plateau of the Geomagnetic Average Planetary (Ap) index, that I’ve plotted below. This is something that does not appear in the previous cycle:

What is most interesting about the Geomagnetic Average Planetary Index graph above is what happened around October 2005. Notice the sharp drop in the magnetic index and the continuance at low levels, almost as if something “switched off”.

You may recall from earlier posts that scientists forecasted sunspot activity to begin to appear in March with the next cycle. Then they revised that to May. So what do we have as of June 2, 2008?

(Source)

Spotless!