Courtesy spaceweather.com
The year 2009 has moved into 8th place in the rankings of years with the most sunspot-free days since 1900.
The top 10 are shown in the accompanying graph; three of these have been in the past three years.
In fact, 2008, which was the quietest solar year in a century, could be bettered by 2009. If 70% of the remaining days in 2009 are sunspot free, we’ll pass 2008, bumping it into 3rd place. The greatest number of sunspot free days since the year 1900 was in 1913, with approx. 320. The math shows that this record at least is safe for another year.
Another measure of solar sleep is the 10-centimeter radio flux streaming out from the nearest star to Earth. This too has been at very low levels in 2009, continuing the trend of the past two years.
UPDATE...Author note: Solar activity began increasing about two months after this original post as Cycle 24 finally took hold; by the spring of 2010 there was no question the sun was "alive and well" with sunspot activity.
Comments
Don't you mean "The year 2009 has moved into 2nd place in the rankings of years with the most sunspot-free days since 1900?"
Mark, thanks for your comment, but 2009 has only had 168 blank days as of August 5th; if you examine the graph you will see that 2008 had over 250. While it's certainly possible 2009 will exceed 2008 in total number of blank sunspot days, we're quite a was from that point now.
Thanks for reading; take care.
Steve LaNore
Dallas Weather Examiner
Chief Meteorologist
KXII-TV
Sorry for typo; I meant "WAYS" from that now. -:)
SCL
You wrote, "it does seem odd that such a small change in the sun’s energy flow to Earth (about 0.1-0.2%) could be masked by the supposed “strong signal” of human-induced climate change."
I suspect you meant the sun's energy flow....'could mask' the supposed "strong signal", instead of 'could be masked by'.
And thank you for not trying to force the observations to fit with the models.
Did you know that a dearth of sun spots, cooler than average summer (as experienced by much of the country), and a late hurricane season all independently correlate to a very cold winter? I find this rather...chilling.
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