Solar Weather

Around 1963 I my parents called me outside the house in the warm summer evening to see something I had been told about but had never seen, the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights. I am not sure today if my parents had ever witnessed them before or how they noticed what was happening that night but upon stepping out the door it was immediately obvious something was happening in the sky that was very unusual for Connecticut. A yellow green arc stretched from horizon to horizon, east to west, directly overhead. North of this arc, the sky was hazy and blotched with purples and greens. About half way to the eastern horizon was a red blotch that looked like a star burst covering an area several times the size of a full moon and all of this was flickering or oscillating just beyond what I could perceive.

I lived in a subdivision and as I calmed down a bit and looked around I saw whole families setting up lawn chairs out in their yards in the light of this event to watch. The event went on for 2-3 hours with the last purple green curtains limited to the North and Northeast fading around 11:00 that night. From then on I have had a pact with my brother that if either of us was outside and saw the lights that we would call the other immediately regardless of the hour. We have done this two to three times since. The last occurring about four years ago. This was during a period of significant sunspot and flare activity that occurred at the end of the last solar sunspot cycle. I monitored this activity daily on the SOHO solar satellite observatory web site site. Some of the most powerful solar flares ever measured occurred during this period causing the site to revise the x-ray and proton flux line charts to show flare intensity above M and X class that would have gone off the page without the chart adjustment.

We are now supposedly climbing up the sunspot cycle towards a peek expected within the next 2-3 years, yet since the surge in events at the end of the last cycle this activity has seemed to go to sleep. I just looked at the SOHO site and noted not one sunspot or irregular area visible. The chart that four years ago showed a line chart regularly interrupted with spikes exceeding M and X class intensities was flat. It seems odd that there could be such dramatic variance when you consider the size of the sun and the violence and intensity of the "normal" activity occurring, Thermonuclear reactions continuously occurring held in check by the weight of the nuclear fuel itself. What would cause it to go from complete turmoil to quiescent uniformity in a short 2-3 year span of time? A view of earth at any time from space will not fail to show some stormy areas boiling up and spiraling to the north or south. How could the sun be so calm over most of its enormous surface? Is this something new that we have not witnessed to date?

Solar wind, the particle flow from the sun, enhanced by flares and eruptions that eject plasma in our direction, normally impact the Earth's magnetic field that protects us from what might otherwise be lethal radiation levels. The system overloads occasionally releasing of high energy particles along the magnetic field lines into the atmosphere, mostly over the poles, a resulting in the aurora. The lights are evidence of energy being deposited into the atmosphere on a global scale. In the rarefied air at the altitudes where the aurora normally occur, temperature does not have the same meaning it does on the surface of the earth. The speeding up of the air molecules caused by solar particle impacts technically is a temperature rise but not one that would sensed by our skin. However as the energy cascades down towards the surface the effect spreads out and can not help but raise the temperature even minutely of the ocean of air it is impacting.

For many years we have been experiencing large scale activity on the sun and heightened levels of particle and electromagnetic energy impingement on the Earth's atmosphere. Though there is no doubt that human activity is raising the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere, could there also have been a contributing factor from the sun? Now with the sun experiencing the least activity recorded in recent history, could there be a noticeable effect in the rate of warming or possibly even a reversal. Not immediately of course but over a period of months or years and the longer this quite sun persists could the effect become more pronounced?

For the past 1-2 million years, based on sediment analysis of deposits of pollen, river debris and other material laid down by wind and water, it is believed the Earth has experienced major glacial advances about every 100,000 years. The last major glaciation melted about 50,000 years ago. We are due for the beginning of the next cycle. What causes the cycle is not known. Latest theories of global warming have the next glacial cycle being delayed or cancelled. This is based on the trends in temperature rise observed in the past few hundred years. However, it has been hotter than it is currently in the past and glaciers still advanced. Assuming we can extrapolate recent past atmospheric temperature history through the next glacial cycle may not be as secure as we believe. Reducing carbon emissions is the right thing to do. We need to live in harmony with our spaceship Earth. However, the statement "we do not know what we do not know" may never be truer. We do not understand why the Earth plummets into cold periods lasting tens of thousands of years but we know this has happened many times in the past. Could this be as simple as a sustained reduction in solar particle and radiation impingement on the Earth and if so is a gradual cooling and refreezing of the poles as inevitable as a oil tanker hitting the reef hours after making the wrong turn?

Stay tuned.

April 13, 2009