NASA
Solar Storm Warning 2012 - Solar Maximum
Dr.
Tony Phillips
10 Mar 2006
source:
Nasa.gov
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.
This week 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.
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.
Like most
experts in the field, Hathaway has confidence in the conveyor belt model
and agrees with Dikpati that the next solar maximum
should be a doozy. But he disagrees with one point. Dikpati's forecast
puts Solar Max at 2012. Hathaway believes it will arrive sooner, in
2010 or 2011.
"History shows that big sunspot cycles 'ramp up' faster than small ones,"
he says. "I expect to see the first sunspots of the next cycle appear
in late 2006 or 2007—and Solar Max to be underway by 2010 or 2011."
Who's right? Time will tell. Either way, a storm is coming. |
