[Wron NIEmiecki]

Solar Cycle 24 Remains The Weakest In 170 Years… Svaalgard: “None Of Us Alive Have Ever Seen Such A Weak Cycle”

By Frank Bosse and Fritz Vahrenholt
Translated and edited by P Gosselin)
For solar observers there was quite a bit of activity last month, namely sunspots, and not too few of them. Activity even reached 84% of the mean value calculated from cycles 1-23. With an official SSN (sunspot number) of 90.3 the sun reached a second peak in December 2013, see the following chart:

Figure 1: Comparison of solar cycle 24 activity to the mean value of the previously observed cycles and to that of solar cycle 5.

As far as sunspot activity is concerned, the peak was comparable to what we observed 25 months ago (November 2011), but this time most activity occurring in the sun’s southern hemisphere: 82%. In the sun’s first cycle 24 outbreak, most of the activity happened in the northern hemisphere. To compare the activity of the current cycle to that of past solar cycles, we plot the sunspot anomalies from the mean for the number of sunspots up to 61 months into the cycle (blue curve in Figure 1). This yields Figure 2:

Figure 2: Accumulated number of sunspots since the beginning of the cycle, taking modified method of counting before 1945 though the “Waldmeier- Discontinuity” (see Cliver et al. 2013). Cycle 24 so far is the 5th least active cycle in over 250 years.

The low level of activity of the Dalton Minimum at the start of the 19th century is plain to see, as well as the rather relatively subdued activity that followed until about 1950. Then there was a significant increase until cycle 23 which heralded a drop that is now continuing today. Single months with increased activity hardly change the overall trend. As before we are currently seeing the lowest level of solar activity in terms of sunspots in the last 170 years.