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Scientists Issue Unprecedented Forecast of Next Sunspot Cycle

BOULDER—The next sunspot cycle will be 30-50% stronger than the last one and begin as much as a year late, according to a breakthrough forecast using a computer model of solar dynamics developed by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Predicting the Sun’s cycles accurately, years in advance, will help societies plan for active bouts of solar storms, which can slow satellite orbits, disrupt communications, and bring down power systems.

The scientists have confidence in the forecast because, in a series of test runs, the newly developed model simulated the strength of the past eight solar cycles with more than 98% accuracy. The forecasts are generated, in part, by tracking the subsurface movements of the sunspot remnants of the previous two solar cycles. The team is publishing its forecast in the current issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

Read the rest at Watts Up With That? and be sure to read it to the very end. I swiped the title of this post from a comment on the same site.

What brought this up is the news that NOAA has revised their earlier prediction of an active sunspot cycle downward. In my opinion, not downward enough...but they still have time to revise their figures again, and again. Previous predictions [2006] had the sunspot numbers being between 150 and 200.

**8.32am** Check out this animated gif.

**8.47am** Digital Diatribes has another excellent post of the temperature data he has been analyzing and graphing. (The numbers don't lie).

Here is a snippet of the latest from NOAA:

May 29, 2009: An international panel of experts led by NOAA and sponsored by NASA has released a new prediction for the next solar cycle. Solar Cycle 24 will peak, they say, in May 2013 with a below-average number of sunspots.

"If our prediction is correct, Solar Cycle 24 will have a peak sunspot number of 90, the lowest of any cycle since 1928 when Solar Cycle 16 peaked at 78," says panel chairman Doug Biesecker of the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center.

Source: NASA

I wonder if these "scientists" have even taken a moment of their time to look at the following chart of sunspot cycles in their zeal to predict a solar cycle that means the earth will be warning...

**9.52am** I have been informed that even the graph above is misleading...that the scientists have replaced the more accurate Wolf Number with the Group Number to make the modern sunspot numbers look even greater than they are...please find a better graph below:


Click Image for larger version


Source: Solar Cycle 24
Hat Tip: Scarlet Girl