Researchers say a storm is coming--the most intense solar maximum in fifty years.
It's official: Solar minimum has arrived. Sunspots have all but vanished. Solar flares are nonexistent. The sun is utterly quiet.
Like the quiet before a storm.
Recently researchers announced that a storm is
coming--the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction
comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for
Atmospheric Research (NCAR). "The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50%
stronger than the previous one," she says. If correct, the years ahead
could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic
Solar Max of 1958.
That was a solar maximum. The Space Age was just
beginning: Sputnik was launched in Oct. 1957 and Explorer 1 (the first
US satellite) in Jan. 1958. In 1958 you couldn't tell that a solar storm
was underway by looking at the bars on your cell phone; cell phones
didn't exist. Even so, people knew something big was happening when
Northern Lights were sighted three times in Mexico. A similar maximum
now would be noticed by its effect on cell phones, GPS, weather
satellites and many other modern technologies.
Right: Intense auroras over Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1958. [More]
Dikpati's prediction is unprecedented. In nearly-two
centuries since the 11-year sunspot cycle was discovered, scientists
have struggled to predict the size of future maxima--and failed. Solar
maxima can be intense, as in 1958, or barely detectable, as in 1805,
obeying no obvious pattern.
The key to the mystery, Dikpati realized years ago, is a conveyor belt on the sun.
We have something similar here on Earth--the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt, popularized in the sci-fi movie The Day After Tomorrow.
It is a network of currents that carry water and heat from ocean to
ocean--see the diagram below. In the movie, the Conveyor Belt stopped
and threw the world's weather into chaos.