Solar Update

By David Archibald

2 February 2022

Reports from the current Northern Hemisphere winter include plenty of low temperature records broken, frozen seas off Greece, etc., suggesting that the world is cooling. A correspondent in Missouri writes:

Nearly 800 chill hours here so far … cold forecast for the next 2 weeks. Will hit 1000 easily. The average when we moved here not quite 20 years ago was 5-600 … for the entire winter. (Chill hours refer to the total amount of time a fruit tree needs to be exposed to cold winter temperatures to allow them break dormancy so they will flower and set fruit normally.)

So that is good news for Missouri — they will now be able to grow things like peaches with a high chill hour requirement for fruiting. Confirmation of colder Northern Hemisphere winters is provided by the snow mass trend by the Finnish Meteorological Institute:

Figure 1: Northern Hemisphere snow mass for winter 2021 – 2022

As Figure 1 shows, the snow mass in the Northern Hemisphere is on trend to set a record. The greater the snow mass, the longer it will take to melt and thus albedo (reflection of sunlight back out to space) will be increased, providing a positive feedback that results in more cooling.

Meanwhile the Liberal and Labor parties continue to promise to wreck the Australian economy in order to ward off global warming.

The cause of the cooling is evident in the solar record:

Figure 2: F10.7 flux aligned on solar minimum.

Solar Cycle 25 is tracking 24 closely so far and so is much weaker than most solar cycles since the 1950s. The average length of a solar cycle is 11.1 years, which in turn is mainly due to the orbital period of Jupiter of 11.8 years.

Figure 3: F10.7 flux and Oulu neutron count

Through most of the instrument record, the inverted Oulu neutron count used to track the F10.7 flux* closely. There was a regime change in 2006 and now the Oulu neutron count is consistently higher relative to 10.7 flux. The recent data suggests that the gap is widening, which means more neutrons are reaching the lower atmosphere where they can initiate cloud droplet formation, which in turn will reflect more sunlight and cool the planet. More neutrons would be in response to a weaker interplanetary magnetic field, so what is that showing?

Figure 4: Interplanetary Magnetic Field 1966 – 2022

The interplanetary magnetic field remains low relative to the levels of the Modern Warm Period, which ended in 2006.

Figure 5: Ap Index 1932 – 2022

The Ap Index is a geomagnetic index that measure disturbance of the Earth’s magnetic field by solar activity. The graph clearly shows the discontinuity from the Modern Warm Period.

Figure 6: University of Alabama Huntsville satellite temperature record 1978 – 2022

Current temperatures are barely higher than what they were 40 years ago. A downtrend has been established since the high of the El Nino event of 2016.

Policies that will impoverish the nation and weaken its ability to defend itself should be continually questioned.

* F10.7 is solar radiation at a particular microwave wavelength. The F10.7 level correlates well with the sunspot number and other measures of solar activity.

David Archibald is the author of The Anticancer Garden in Australia

Note: This article was first published on: https://wentworthreport.com/solar-update/