In the past we have had some strange activity on the Surface of the Sun that has gone under the "coincidence" heading.....here is another story from SpaceWeather....BTW my favourite "coincidence" story was from 2011, do you remember this.......Space.com - Comet Dive-Bombs Sun During Big Solar Eruption - A comet plunged into the sun this week just as a huge eruption exploded from the star's surface, but the two events are likely not related, NASA scientists say.....
SpaceWeather.com...Click source link for Video... Not every eruption requires a sunspot. On April 1st, a magnetic filament snaking some 800,000 km around the sun's north pole rose up and erupted, hurling part of itself into space. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) recorded the event [click source for Video]
Watch the movie again and pay attention to the southern hemisphere. Another filament erupted there in apparent sympathy with events in the north. Coincidence? Probably not. Invisible threads of magnetism connect widely separated parts of the sun, so an explosion in one place can trigger another explosion very far away. SDO has observed many such chain reactions--the iconic example being the global eruption of August 2010.
This article from the Daily Mail in 2009 was posted on Twitter yesterday, you may want to also have a read in light of the current temperature changes going on with the Jet Stream ....lets all hope this is just an exaggeration or a figment of the authors imagination......
It took just six months for a warm and sunny Europe to be engulfed in ice, according to new research.
Previous studies have suggested the arrival of the last Ice Age nearly 13,000 years ago took about a decade - but now scientists believe the process was up to 20 times as fast.
In scenes reminiscent of the Hollywood blockbuster The day After Tomorrow, the Northern Hemisphere was frozen by a sudden slowdown of the Gulf Stream, which allowed ice to spread hundreds of miles southwards from the Arctic.
Geological sciences professor William Patterson, who led the research, said: 'It would have been very sudden for those alive at the time. It would be the equivalent of taking Britain and moving it to the Arctic over the space of a few months.'
Warmist scientists would have us believe it is. One recent European study claims that CO2 and temperature rose simultaneously at the end of the last ice age, implying CO2 is a real driver. However, one prominent German meteorologist dismissed it and bluntly called the Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Géophysique de l’Environnement study by Parrenin et al ”the latest gag“.
Now yet another new study published at Quaternary Science Reviews shows in no uncertain terms that the sun, the source of almost all of the Earth’s thermal energy, drives the climate and that the climate naturally swings in cycles.
The paper looks at the relationship between climatic variations, vegetation dynamics and early human activity between c. 4150–2860 BC reconstructed from a high-resolution pollen and geochemical record obtained from a small lake located in County Sligo, Ireland.
The study shows that human activity responded to changing climate conditions over the period. No surprise there. For example the abstract writes: “A nearly century-long climatic amelioration between c. 3460–3370 BC facilitated a revival of human activity on a small scale around the lake. Abandonment of the area and full woodland recovery occurred after a period of particularly wet and cool conditions ranging from c. 3360–3290 BC.”
An artist's concept of the Wind spacecraft sampling the solar wind. Justin Kasper's science result is inset.
March 8, 2013: Using data from an aging NASA spacecraft, researchers have found signs of an energy source in the solar wind that has caught the attention of fusion researchers. NASA will be able to test the theory later this decade when it sends a new probe into the sun for a closer look.
The discovery was made by a group of astronomers trying to solve a decades-old mystery: What heats and accelerates the solar wind?
The solar wind is a hot and fast flow of magnetized gas that streams away from the sun's upper atmosphere. It is made of hydrogen and helium ions with a sprinkling of heavier elements. Researchers liken it to the steam from a pot of water boiling on a stove; the sun is literally boiling itself away.
“But,” says Adam Szabo of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, “solar wind does something that steam in your kitchen never does. As steam rises from a pot, it slows and cools. As solar wind leaves the sun, it accelerates, tripling in speed as it passes through the corona. Furthermore, something inside the solar wind continues to add heat even as it blows into the cold of space."
Something unexpected is happening on the sun. 2013 is supposed to be the year of Solar Max, but solar activity is much lower than expected. At least one leading forecaster expects the sun to rebound with a double-peaked maximum later this year.
Swept away by global warming climate change hysteria, governments are not ready for crop failures and shorter growing seasons of global cooling, foreshadowed by low solar activity. Though NASA is currently reporting a massive sunspot, solar cycle 24, our current phase, has been half as active as previous cycles suggesting another imminent Little Ice Age that could devastate food production for decades.
Last week NASA released images of a massive, growing sunspot that is six times the size of earth. The Smithsonian Magazine reported on possible damaging impacts of a solar storm if directed at our planet. However, Friends of Science say this may foreshadow a problem North America is unprepared for – global cooling. Many solar researchers are convinced that the sun is entering into a long term period of very low activity.
“Our position is that the sun is the main driver of climate change. Scientists have identified that the sun has 11 year cycles of sunspot activity. Now the sun is near the peak of cycle 24. Yet this cycle is about half the intensity of the previous one,” says Ken Gregory, director of Friends of Science. “The current cycle is the weakest since the one that peaked in 1906 at the end of the Little Ice Age.”
A constant stream of particles and electromagnetic waves streams from the sun toward Earth, which is surrounded by a protective bubble called the magnetosphere. A scientist at NASA Goddard has recently devised, for the first time, a set of equations that can help describe waves in the solar wind known as Alfven waves. Credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Many areas of scientific research -- Earth's weather, ocean currents, the outpouring of magnetic energy from the sun -- require mapping out the large scale features of a complex system and its intricate details simultaneously.
Describing such systems accurately, relies on numerous kinds of input, beginning with observations of the system, incorporating mathematical equations to approximate those observations, running computer simulations to attempt to replicate observations, and cycling back through all the steps to refine and improve the models until they jibe with what's seen. Ultimately, the models successfully help scientists describe, and even predict, how the system works.
07 February 2013 - The Met Office welcomes the Royal Academy of Engineering report on Space Weather, the UK's first in-depth study of the impacts of space weather.
The report concludes that whilst the space weather risk can be engineered out of many systems, there is a still a need for real-time alerting and forecasting of space weather to help minimise the risks it poses.
The UK Government has already made an investment in the development of a space weather prediction capability within the Met Office's existing scientific and forecasting capabilities.
Mark Gibbs, Met Office Space Weather Business Manager, said: "Space weather is a relatively immature science but understanding is growing rapidly and here at the Met Office we are working with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Centre in the US. This collaboration aims to enable both organisations to accelerate the development of improved space weather models and prediction systems to make more effective use of space weather data."
Through this work the Met Office is currently developing a real-time space weather warning service on behalf of the UK.
For the 8th day in a row, solar activity is very low. None of the sunspots on the Earthside of the sun is actively flaring. NOAA forecasters put the odds of an M-class solar flare today at no more than 5%.