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Explanation: Tsunamis this large don't happen on Earth. During 2006, a large solar flare from an Earth-sized sunspot produced a tsunami-type shock wave that was spectacular even for the Sun. Pictured above, the tsunami wave was captured moving out from active region AR 10930 by the Optical Solar Patrol Network (OSPAN) telescope in New Mexico, USA. The resulting shock wave, known technically as a Moreton wave, compressed and heated up gasses including hydrogen in the photosphere of the Sun, causing a momentarily brighter glow. The above image was taken in a very specific red color emitted exclusively by hydrogen gas....

Explanation: Here is one of the sharper views of the Sun ever taken. This stunning image shows remarkable details of a dark sunspot across the image bottom and numerous boiling granules which appear like kernels of corn across the top. Taken in 2002, the picture was made using the Swedish Solar Telescope operating on the Canary Island of La Palma. The high resolution image was achieved using sophisticated adaptive optics, digital image stacking, and other processing techniques to counter the blurring effect of Earth's atmosphere. Currently a sunspot group is crossing the Sun that is so large it can be...

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Anthony Watts THE DEMISE OF SUNSPOTS—DEEP COOLING AHEAD?Don J. Easterbrook, Professor of Geology, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WAThe three studies released by NSO’s Solar Synoptic Network this week, predicting the virtual vanishing of sunspots for the next several decades and the possibility of a solar minimum similar to the Maunder Minimum, came as stunning news. According to Frank Hill, “the fact that three completely different views of the Sun point in the same direction is a powerful indicator that the sunspot cycle may be going into hibernation.” The last time sunspots vanished from the...

“All three of these lines of research to point to the familiar sunspot cycle shutting down for a while.” I’ve managed to get a copy of the official press release provided by the Southwest Research Institute Planetary Science Directorate to MSM journalists, for today’s stunning AAS announcement and it is reprinted in full here: WHAT’S DOWN WITH THE SUN? MAJOR DROP IN SOLAR ACTIVITY PREDICTED Latitude-time plots of jet streams under the Sun's surface show the surprising shutdown of the solar cycle mechanism. New jet streams typically form at about 50 degrees latitude (as in 1999 on this plot) and...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – For years, scientists have been predicting the Sun would by around 2012 move into solar maximum, a period of intense flares and sunspot activity, but lately a curious calm has suggested quite the opposite. According to three studies released in the United States on Tuesday, experts believe the familiar sunspot cycle may be shutting down and heading toward a pattern of inactivity unseen since the 17th century. The signs include a missing jet stream, fading spots, and slower activity near the poles, said experts from the National Solar Observatory and Air Force Research Laboratory. "This is highly...

It’s official: a new Ice Age is on its way. In what has been described as “the science story of the century”, heavyweight US solar physicists have announced that the sun is heading for a prolonged period of low activity. This makes global cooling a much more plausible prospect in the next few decades than global warming. Indeed, it might even usher in a lengthy period of climate grimness such as we saw during the Maunder Minimum (when Ice Fairs were held on the Thames) or the Dalton Minimum (which brought us such delights as the 1816 Year Without A...

Some unusual solar readings, including fading sunspots and weakening magnetic activity near the poles, could be indications that our sun is preparing to be less active in the coming years. The results of three separate studies seem to show that even as the current sunspot cycle swells toward the solar maximum, the sun could be heading into a more-dormant period, with activity during the next 11-year sunspot cycle greatly reduced or even eliminated. ...Currently, the sun is in the midst of the period designated as Cycle 24 and is ramping up toward the cycle's period of maximum activity. However, the...

Some unusual solar readings, including fading sunspots and weakening magnetic activity near the poles, could be indications that our sun is preparing to be less active in the coming years. The results of three separate studies seem to show that even as the current sunspot cycle swells toward the solar maximum, the sun could be heading into a more-dormant period, with activity during the next 11-year sunspot cycle greatly reduced or even eliminated. The results of the new studies were announced today (June 14) at the annual meeting of the solar physics division of the American Astronomical Society, which is...

Enlarge Image Brrr ... Cold winters in 17th century Europe, as shown in this painting by Hendrick Avercamp, may have been caused by a lack of solar activity after all. Credit: Hendrick Avercamp/Wikimedia Commons BOSTON—For decades, astronomers and climatologists have debated whether a prolonged 17th century cold spell, best documented in Europe, could have been caused by erratic behavior of the sun. Now, an American solar physicist says he has new evidence to suggest that the sun was indeed the culprit. The sun isn’t as constant as it appears. Instead, its surface is regularly beset by storms of swirling...

Recent observations of sunspots, the high temperature of the corona and CMEs strongly suggest that they are all caused by highly energetic solid bodies falling into the Sun. This hypothesis is consistent with the rapid (3000 mph) downward flow of gases in sunspot interiors observed by SOHO, their lower temperatures, and the presence of large quantities of water in their spectra. The high velocity of the incoming body entrains the surface gases, carrying them rapidly downward. The vaporization of the bodies cools the local gases and the water released from the bodies produces the observed spectra. Solar flares and CMEs...

Commando Solo: Libya PSYOPs Mission Broadcast Had excellent (almost epic) sunspot activity today. Managed to log Alaska, Argentina, Australia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Japan, Korea, Libya, Mexico, Sudan and Trinidad and Tobago. The Libya logging was the most special to me because it involved a crew I’ve been trying to intercept for some time. ‘Commando Solo’ is a United States Air Force EC-130J designed for one purpose and that’s psychological operations (PsyOps). The aircraft is equipped with high powered television and radio transmitters intended to broadcast pre-recorded propaganda messages. The following audio clip is a broadcast they made today on 10405...

Credit: Andrés Muñoz-Jaramillo and Tom Bridgman/NASA The sun is usually a predictable beast, at least as far as its sunspot cycle goes. Every 11 years or so, the sun's magnetic activity peaks and then troughs, resulting in relatively high and then low numbers of dark spots and flares on the solar surface. But in the cycle that has just finished, the trough went on for much longer than normal, with more than twice as many days without sunspots compared with previous cycles. To figure out what caused this, researchers used a computer simulation of the churning hot plasma inside...

SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) – A trio of top solar scientists said on Wednesday they had solved the mystery behind the disappearance of sunspots, a phenomenon that has stumped astrophysicists worldwide for more than two centuries. The research, which will be published on Thursday in the journal Nature, shows that unusually weak magnetic fields on the sun paired with reduced solar activity cause sunspots to disappear. Sunspots appear to the human eye as dark spots on the sun, some as wide as 49,000 miles, according to NASA. They are caused by intense magnetic activity, or storms, on the sun's surface, which...

SOLAR FLARE: Sunspot 1158 has just unleashed the strongest solar flare of the year, an M6.6-category blast @ 1738 UT on Feb. 13th. The eruption appears to have launched a coronal mass ejection (CME) toward Earth. It also produced a loud blast of radio emissions heard in shortwave receivers around the dayside of our planet. Stay tuned for updates! BEHEMOTH SUNSPOT 1158: Sunspot 1158 is growing rapidly (48 hour movie) and crackling with M-class solar flares. The active region is now more than 100,000 km wide with at least a dozen Earth-sized dark cores scattered beneath its unstable magnetic canopy....

From the Marshall Space Flight Center, Dr. Hathaway’s page: Current prediction for the next sunspot cycle maximum gives a smoothed sunspot number maximum of about 58 in July of 2013. We are currently two years into Cycle 24 and the predicted size continues to fall.Additionally, the monthly data plots are out, and there’s been little change from last month in the three major solar indexes plotted by the Space Weather Prediction Center: h/t to WUWT reader harrywr2

It's official, Tampa Bay: December 2010 was the coldest December in recorded history. Overall, the average daily temperature, the high and the low divided by two, was about 10 degrees below the norm for the month. Tampa set a new record low at 53.2 degrees, besting the previous record of 54.5 degrees in 1935. It was even colder than January 2010's record-breaking cold snap. St. Petersburg's 56.3 degrees beat a record of 56.9, also from 1935. In Hernando County, Brooksville set a record at 52 degrees. The previous low was 54.1 in 1935. St. Leo, in Pasco County, also set...

The coming year will be an important one for space weather as the Sun pulls out of a trough of low activity and heads into a long-awaited and possibly destructive period of turbulence. Many people may be surprised to learn that the Sun, rather than burn with faultless consistency, goes through moments of calm and tempest. But two centuries of observing sunspots -- dark, relatively cool marks on the solar face linked to mighty magnetic forces -- have revealed that our star follows a roughly 11-year cycle of behaviour. The latest cycle began in 1996 and for reasons which are...

Santa brought us a new Sunspot prediction to be added to NASA’s incredibly high series of at least five ill-fated predictions starting in 2006. NASA’s latest peak Sunspot Number for Solar Cycle #24 (SC24) is down 60% from their original, but it still seems a bit too high, judging by David Archibald’s recent WUWT posting that analogizes SC24 and SC25 to SC5 and SC6 which peaked around 50, during the cold period (Dalton minimum) of the early 1800′s. According to Yogi Berra “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Team leader Dr. Mausumi Dikpati of NASA’s National Center...

Scientists studying sunspots for the past 2 decades have concluded that the magnetic field that triggers their formation has been steadily declining. If the current trend continues, by 2016 the sun's face may become spotless and remain that way for decades—a phenomenon that in the 17th century coincided with a prolonged period of cooling on Earth. Sunspots appear when upwellings of the sun's magnetic field trap ionized plasma—or electrically charged, superheated gas—on the surface. Normally, the gas would release its heat and sink back below the surface, but the magnetic field inhibits this process. From Earth, the relatively cool surface...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere are unexpectedly shrinking and cooling due to lower ultraviolet radiation from the sun, US scientists said Thursday. The sun's energy output dropped to unusually low levels from 2007 to 2009, a significantly long spell with virtually no sunspots or solar storms, according to scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. During that period, the thermosphere, whose altitude ranges from about 55 to 300 miles (90 to 500 kilometers), shrank and contracted from the sharp drop in ultraviolet radiation, said the study published in the American Geophysical Union's...