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A Month Without Sunspots: February 2019

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday March 05 2019, @10:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the have-to-wear-shades dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A MONTH WITHOUT SUNSPOTS: There are 28 days in February. This year, all 28 of them were spotless. The sun had no sunspots for the entire month of Feb. 2019.

The last time a full calendar month passed without a sunspot was August 2008. At the time, the sun was in the deepest Solar Minimum of the Space Age. Now a new Solar Minimum is in progress and it is shaping up to be similarly deep. So far this year, the sun has been blank 73% of the time--the same as 2008.

Solar Minimum is a normal part of the solar cycle. Every ~11 years, sunspot counts drop toward zero. Dark cores that produce solar flares and CMEs vanish from the solar disk, leaving the sun blank for long stretches of time. These minima have been coming and going with regularity since the sunspot cycle was discovered in 1859.

However, not all Solar Minima are alike. The last one in 2008-2009 surprised observers with its depth and side-effects. Sunspot counts dropped to a 100-year low; the sun dimmed by 0.1%; Earth's upper atmosphere collapsed, allowing space junk to accumulate; the pressure of the solar wind flagged while cosmic rays (normally repelled by solar wind) surged to Space Age highs. All these things are happening again.

http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=01&month=03&year=2019

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  • (Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05 2019, @03:38PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05 2019, @03:38PM (#810278)

    If you are going to delete every story about how records for cold are being set, you also need to delete them in the (Northern Hemisphere) summer when the same stories come out about how warm it is:
    https://i.ibb.co/QcRnP80/soylentnews2019-03-04.png [i.ibb.co]

    When summer comes around we will remember this.

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  • (Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday March 05 2019, @04:56PM

    by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Tuesday March 05 2019, @04:56PM (#810306) Homepage Journal

    They don't say delete. And they don't say erase. They say "flag it as to not display." Or they say "reject." Fancy ways of saying, it's not something they want us to know. But don't worry, anybody can be an Editor. Anybody who kisses enough ass & never ever rocks the boat. Groupthink is goodthink!

  • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday March 05 2019, @07:34PM (2 children)

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Tuesday March 05 2019, @07:34PM (#810383) Journal

    HAHAHAH!

    Really, you think this is newsworthy:

    "February for much of Montana in top 5 ever for cold/snow."

    You have the entire world to cherry-pick from and the best you can come up with is not even a record and doesn't even apply to an entire state.

    SAD

    • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05 2019, @07:43PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05 2019, @07:43PM (#810391)

      Also this weekend, a ferocious, "punishing" blast of record cold air will first invade the central U.S. Saturday into Sunday, then attack the eastern and southern U.S. early next week, the National Weather Service said.

      How cold? By Sunday morning, some parts of the northern Plains will see wind chills nearing 55 degrees below zero. A few spots could see all-time record cold temperatures for March, the weather service predicted.

      https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/03/01/winter-storm-coast-coast-snow-then-record-cold-march-roars/3020109002/ [usatoday.com]

      Snow, rain and heat records were tied or broken from coast to coast in February.

      https://weather.com/safety/winter/news/2019-02-25-february-has-broken-monthly-records-from-coast-to-coast [weather.com]

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05 2019, @10:19PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05 2019, @10:19PM (#810447)

        *throws snowball*

        see? AGW is a hoax!!

        I'd respond more seriously but it would probably just be a waste of time.