Looking now at the journal situation publishing solar physics, sunspots and solar weather, it’s fair to say none of them offer drafts or open peer review (cf Arctic research at Copernicus), most don’t require attaching supplemental data allowing third party reproduction, updating or reanalysis of results, many seem to have loose standards on contribution merit, some don’t seem too concerned about verbosity, excessive self-citation and non-citation of conflicting or earlier results, and all have outrageous pay-per-pdf and heavy charges for open access discouraging access and sharing.
If peer review can’t cut the clutter, why not just stop at a preprint server? With so many recent papers inevitably
dead wrong about Solar Cycle 25, one wonders how many will be retracted. Most likely none, followup papers will instead tweak or de-emphasize previously favored solar observable analysis while praising early pioneering efforts (their own). IOP journals are moving to double-blind peer review (both authors and reviewers masked) which might help.
On the plus side, most use arxiv as a central preprint server (unlike Arctic researchers) but not many have researchGate pages. It’s possible to sign up for an arxiv email alerting system, taking care to pick ‘sun’ AND subject class ‘astro-ph.SR’ within the broader topic of ‘astro-ph’. Yet even narrowed, who can keep up with a thousand solar papers/year volume — and how are we any the wiser for it? In the last twelve months, 58 papers addressed sunspots out of 714 on the sun. Some 60 papers in the last ten years corrected the historical record of sunspot numbers — maybe that should have been
fixed first before writing so many papers using a flawed record.
https://arxiv.org/search/advancedAstrophysics uses a graphics-and-numerics bundling format called FITS. Rather like netCDF and HDF, the concept is to replace a folder full of files with a single immensely complicated master file in machine-readable binary. ImageJ and GIMP readily open FITS graphics, even at 32-bit. However cross-disciplinary climate research, for example total solar irradiance, is otherwise blocked by diverse packaging. Some journals offer FITS graphs in DEXTER format allowing data retrieval though this approach; it has not caught on elsewhere in scientific publishing. MathJax allows scalable display of equation-heavy text in browsers, a substantial improvement over fixed bitmaps.
Elsevier’s notion of Living Reviews is an excellent one — authors of the Solar Physics section can regularly update articles (though it’s not clear how many do nor how they’re further credited).
https://www.springer.com/journal/41116)
The social media component, mainly Twitter, has fairly good coverage of daily solar developments and new research developments. It’s fair to say a handful of citizen-scientists, aurora enthusiasts and solar dot.com sites monitor incoming solar data far more regularly — and sometimes more knowledgeably — than solar physicists themselves. That’s reminiscent of Arctic satellites, buoys and extent/volume.
Curious as to how seriously the affected research community takes the NCAR group’s ideas behind the extended 22-year even-odd Hale cycle and consequent bold Solar Cycle 25 prediction, outside citations to the 23 articles can be tracked subsequent to the key 2014 paper, itself an energy-sapping two year struggle to get published. Frankly, there are not a lot in the expected places — the silly sunspot cycle is still sacred. For example, non-contentious scientific papers of yours truly have been cited 8,960 times, more than the 7,500 for those of SW McIntosh, deputy director of a major federal research facility and breakthrough solar analyst.
However this is rapidly changing as NCAR ideas get better articulated and extended to additional astronomical observables (ie co-plotted), with 3 AGU posters and 9 papers in 2020 alone and eminent outside authorities now joining in as co-authors. Scientists who pitched rival theories while ignoring or dismissing NCAR now seem keen to get on board since the SC25 prediction may be working out.
However that’s hard to track. The pace is more quarterly than monthly or daily. As of 10 Mar 2021, the sunspot for SC25 has reached 40, pushing outside the safety zone of the NOAA/NASA expert panel prediction (fig.1). NCAR itself had to revise its prediction due to a later-than-expected solar minimum for SC24 which lengthened that cycle so increased the delta for the next (relevant per a 2015 Hathaway empirical rule). However the predicted SC25 still remains short at 9.8 years, peaking early in July 2023 with sunspot number only slightly lowered from 234 to 222 (fig.2).
If so, total solar irradiance will still be quite high but not dramatically so. By way of contrast, alternative predictions called for a second Maunder-like minimum and an end to global warming if not the start of another ice age. Erratic sunspot academics and hired climate deniers won’t ‘move on’ in the face of an active cycle — they will simply pivot to blaming higher TSI instead of greenhouse gas emissions for worsening global warming.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2020/03/why-are-so-many-solar-climate-papers-flawed/http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/09/the-trouble-with-sunspots/http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2021/02/laschamps-ing-at-the-bit/https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms9611 extreme 100MeV solar proton events of July 774 CE and May 993 CE
NCAR vs the panel may be fully distinguishable on SSN by the end of 2021 but other aspects such as the special flux change at the 55º helio-latitude must wait for the arrival in Mar 2027 of the Solar Orbiter at 25º above the ecliptic. The end of major solar activity (arrival of pre-terminator) is now set for the first half of 2027 so obviously cannot be vetted until then, despite windowing implications for astronaut and grid safety.
More to the point, NCAR could hardly anticipate significant developments to be found in late 2020 and early 2021 major-journal papers from other research groups. These may provide ways and meanings of refining NCAR predictions or more accurate interpretation of the implied underlying solar physics that makes the NCAR program work. For example, June and Dec 2020 helioseismology papers significantly update understanding of convective cells underpinning solar meridional and torsional transport and a Jan 2021 dendrochronology advance extends solar cycle interval timing back to 969 CE via C-14 accelerator mass spectroscopy. Neither result could have been assimilated.
The 11-year cycle shows up clearly in the thousand-year tree ring data though only a wavelet transform has been done on it so far. It’s a much longer record than sunspots will ever be and not dependent on hand-drawn observational histories. Tree data cadence is seasonal rather than Carrington rotations; it’s attached as a supplemental file so ready for a Hilbert transform and epochal averaging after exceptional events are removed. There are plans to extend the tree ring data to the entire Holocene which could help with the longer Gleissberg cycle history. It’s not clear yet whether C-14 data fully supports an extreme Maunder minimum or the extra small cycle proposed for the Dalton.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6498/1469 June 2020
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.09347.pdf 30 Dec 2020
https://presentations.copernicus.org/EGU2020/EGU2020-11118_presentation.pdf poster
https://tinyurl.com/2ctp5jd2 the last thousand years of solar cycles from tree ring C-14 mass spec
Here it must be said that the SW McIntosh program goes well beyond descriptive phenomenology. Hints have been dropped to the effect that N and S hemisphere active regions are somehow coupled in simultaneous meridional outbreaks requiring revision of Babcock-Leighton magnetohydrodynamics. Further, 55º begs for an underlying explanation as critical solar latitude, presumably because it lies at a meeting place of differential solar advection cells.
The main two issues intertwined here are differential rotation of a gaseous body (fastest at the equator) wrapping a conventional (but perhaps off-center) axial magnetic field into toroidal and convective advection of magnetic features, equator-ward for one surface band and poleward for another, with return flow at depth providing conservation of matter.
There may be an NCAR paper in the works positing 4 convective cells (in a single layer) with two controlling feature migration about the equator and two the ‘rush to the poles’. Cell pairs are not quite identical in the two hemispheres, accounting for asymmetry in lead times to polar magnetic reversals and equatorial cancellation offsets. The origin of differences between consecutive even/odd cycles requiring their pairing into a Hale cycle has already been explained.
However certain chaotic aspects of solar behavior may remain forever inexplicable, diluting prospects for solar weather prediction, yet these extreme events can nonetheless be edited out of the historical record to refine predictive parameters applicable to assumed normal times for the current cycle.
NCAR is doing just that for the late-cycle Halloween Storms of 2003 (manifested as an abrupt slope change or 'knee' in Hilbert transform phase) which happened unpredictably during “declining sunspots in another quiet month in the unremarkable waning phase of an average solar cycle” as well as the remarkable Nov 1960 proton/alpha flares and consequent ground level neutron decays. The Bastille Day solar flare of 14 July 2000 was mid-cycle 23 rather than a quiet period outlier.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1962ApJ...136..534Thttp://umich.edu/~lowbrows/history/mcmath-hulbert.html McMath Plage 5925
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.06603.pdf timing terminators 13 mentions of knees
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.07020.pdf DH Hathaway Living Review of solar cycle
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2005JA011137 Lynch 2005 helicity SC23
The extended 2003 event extracted so much magnetic flux and helicity that the next cycle was cheated out of two years length (Lynch 2005). In other words, knees could serve as detectors of these events in past centuries prior to invention and deployment of detectors, though the C-14 tree ring record can pick them up directly and indeed itself might manifest additional 'out-of-cycle' kinks (beyond the 1052 and 1279 CE events already discovered) if the more sensitive Hilbert transform were applied to its record.
Alternatively for purposes of forecasting, removal or deprecation of extreme events would have the effect of regularizing some of mysterious variation in past solar cycle hemispheric and length differences (ie, what does it take to make the knee go away or more broadly, to idealize or groom the cycle overall). This would have the benefit of improving Hathaway's empirical relation between consecutive cycles currently used for SC25 prediction. While 'reverse cherry-picking' of data (grooming) seems inappropriate at first, the bottom line is improved accuracy.
Note unpredictable extreme events within SC25 would throw off the forecast, though aid later with SC26. The sun is a long-running hydrogen bomb; its steadiness has some exceptions.
The New York Railroad Storm of May 1921 (coronal mass ejection) and the Carrington Event (solar flare) of 1859 could also be effectively removed, sharpening residual cycle homogeneity. Extreme events are not all that rare considering that relatively few are aimed effectively enough at the earth to leave terrestrial proxies behind.
The same might be attempted for the far more extreme events of 774, 993, 1052 and 1279 CE evident in tree rings though only slight improvements could result for Gleissberg or Hale cycle length stats.
The colossal 774 CE event is attributable to an extraordinary flux of high energy solar protons that enhanced ionospheric production of C-14, Be-10 and Cl-36 evidenced later in Greenland ice cores,
rather than more galactic cosmic rays entering during a solar-driven diminution of the earth’s protective geomagnetic field.
https://www.essoar.org/doi/pdf/10.1002/essoar.10501832.1 Jan 2020 upper right corner
https://www.weather.gov/media/publications/assessments/SWstorms_assessment.pdfhttps://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019SW002250https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.10326.pdfhttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06036-0 thousand year history of cycles
With a long tradition of entrenched misconceptions, sunspots are an
altogether inadequate metric for inferring solar structure and cyclic evolution.
Active Regions provide a far better framework for solar magnetic phenomena that encompasses sunspots. Limiting context to white light — eyeball appearance in ordinary telescope — makes no sense. There’s a need to bring in all observables at all wavelengths preceding, accompanying and following sunspot birth and decay which include gamma, X-ray, extreme ultraviolet plus outgoing proton, alpha and electron fluxes. This complexity is explained in 31 evolutionary stages in an extraordinarily thorough Living Review (by the editor of Solar Physics):
Evolution of Active Regions
L Driel-Gesztelyi LM Green
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/lrsp-2015-1Active regions don’t emerge at random locations but more commonly nest within a pre-existing magnetic environment formed by previous active regions, a determining factor of lifetime. Repeated episodes of ad hoc flux emergence within an evolving active region leads to increased magnetic field complexity, polarity cancellation and yet more magnetic activity. Thus active regions in quiet regions don’t tell the whole story as hysteresis must be factored in.
So forget sunspots, let’s track active regions instead! The daily Solar Region Summary is officially compiled in a totally half-@ssed way by NOAA/NWS at its Space Weather Prediction Center SWPC. Information is primitively presented in small separate text files of courier, one for each day back to 1996 in a graphics-free layout that hasn’t changed since the days of telnet. There’s no key to inexplicable acronyms.
However the many hundreds of text files can quickly be downloaded by ftp, concatenated sequentially in BBedit, with junk removed by an Excel sort. As of 10 Mar 2021, active region AR2809 is the latest to get assigned a tracking number. I AR2809 is 16th named active region of 2021. Active regions may or may not ever have had sunspots; they may consist solely of plage (defined by H-alpha images). Sunspots are tagged for one of seven magnetic classes by greek letter combinations and also receive one of the 60 valid Zurich-McI descriptive codes.
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/solar-region-summaryhttps://scholar.afit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1348&context=etd Zpc code explained on page 10
ftp://ftp.swpc.noaa.gov/pub/warehouse/2020/Since the declared start of SC25 was Dec 2019, it is necessary to get those 31 + 366 + 69 to retrieve a full set. These begin with AR2753 and end at AR2809 and so consist of jsut 57 active regions for this quiet part of the early cycle. These generate 583 records because each AR is tracked each day it is visible from one of the four reporting terrestrial observatories.
Only alpha, beta and beta-gamma sunspot types of the seven possible have been seen so far in SC25 along with 19 of the 60 Zurich-PMcIntosh Zpc codes. Some 286 entries concern plage which may/may not develop sunspots at the next Carrington rotation (there are no satellites for the back side of the sun). Acronyms include Lo for Carrington longitude, area in millionths of a solar hemisphere, Z for Zurich-PMcIntosh system and so on.
Nmbr Location Lo Area Z LL NN MagType
2808 N19E42 036 0050 Hsx 02 01 Alpha
2809 S21E13 065 0010 Bxo 03 02 Beta
2807 S18W78 156 [plage]
2804 N18 324 [due date for return]
There’s got to be a better way of displaying the daily status and full-spectrum/full disk properties and indeed various dashboards are maintained for that purpose. The most advanced of these, HARPS, extends the concept past NOAA’s visible-light to include the very complex data flow of the 45s cadence Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) instrument on SDO. The future lies not with decades of daily hand-drawn maps and labor-intensive expert annotation in view of the incredible incoming volume of satellite data and need for automated processing.
https://suntoday.lmsal.com/suntoday/?suntoday_date=2021-03-14https://observethesun.com/?current=2021-03-09&objects=2f&past=2020-03-14https://www.solarmonitor.org/?date=20210314shttps://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/solar-activity/region/12807.htmlhttp://jsoc.stanford.edu/HMI/HARPS.html HMI Active Region Patches
Some of these dashboards are so complex that they hardly can load; data is not information. A better way to go is illustrated by a simple yet compelling design restricted to synoptic maps and their coronal holes (marked up by convolutional neural net AI). There’s no log-in, no fumbling with ftp or funky file formats — just buttons for each (or every) Carrington rotation 2098-2240 back to 2010 either as a classical JPEG showing CH boundaries overlaid on a synoptic strip map or a 32-bit FITS grayscale heatmap of the CH regions. The 143 synoptic maps butt up perfectly in ImageJ at 720x360 pixels allowing easy subsequent analysis of cycles and hemispheric asymmetry.
https://sun.njit.edu/#/coronal_holeshttps://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.08529.pdfBack in post #150, a list of 34 co-plottable solar cycle observables was compiled from published graphics. These have time (or modular time) as common abscissa. That list has now grown to 60 (some of these are just smoothing variations, subsequent posts). Given 23 papers and posters from the NCAR group with up to 22 graphs per paper, database organization is needed.
Which solar observables are used how often in the 23 NCAR papers, have any new developments gone unused, which are graphics vs line graphs, which have extractable data (vs data obliterated by over-plotting), which have been phased by a Hilbert or related harmonic transform allowing epochal averaging, which internal cycle markers can best be time-sharpened, and above all, which could provide mid-stream refinement of Solar Cycle 25 and consequent impacts on earth climate?
Frequency of use of solar cycle observables in graphics in last 3 NCAR papers:
11 Term,9 PTerm,7 F10.7,5 CycMin,4 PFS,3 EUVBP,3 SSNnh,3 SSNsh,2 CGL,2 Cycmax,2 Hal2003,2 LymanA,2 MAGdip,2 MAGqua,2 PFSav,2 PFSsmo,2 SSNday,2 SSNnhHilPhase,2 SSNshHilPhase,2 SSNsmo,2 Xflare,1 Ca2K,1 CR,1 EITcor,1 F10.7HilPhase,1 F10.7sm,1 F10.7smo,1 Fe X,1 Fe XVI,1 GNode,1 He II,1 HeA,1 HeAsdev,1 HeAShut,1 HeAsmo,1 HILamp,1 HILphase,1 MAGoct,1 PFR,1 SLWvel ,1 SSA,1 SSAave,1 SSAkurt,1 SSAskew ,1 SSN,1 SSN.NHsm,1 SSN.SHsm,1 SSNarea,1 SSNdayHil,1 SSNdayHilPhase,1 SSNhilEdge,1 SSNlat,1 SSNmon,1 SSNmonHil,1 SSNmonHilPhase,1 SSNnHil,1 SSNnhSmo,1 SSNshSmo,1 SSNsiz,1 SSNsm,total 110
