Solar cycle 24 enigma: TSI on the rise again

The latest results from the TIM/SORCE TSI instrument show that solar cycle 24 hit a peak on Feb 6th at around 1362.3W/m^2. Does anyone think it’ll go any higher?

Scafetta and Willson: “the ACRIM composite as the most likely and precise representation of 35 years of TSI monitoring”

Nicola Scafetta and Richard Willson have a new paper in press which contains the most thorough analysis yet of the intercomparison of the empirical ACRIM and modeled PMOD TSI series. It’s a comprehensive yet readable paper of high interest to all diligent climate researchers interested in determining the relative strengths of various climate drivers. It is also an important historical document for philosophers of science investigating the shift from observation based empirical solar science to model based  dogma underpinning preconceptions of the power of trace gases to control Earth’s surface temperature. The IPCC and Team Wassup’s Leif Svalgaard are not going to like it, and will therefore try to ignore it, thus further underminng their credibility.

ACRIM total solar irradiance satellite composite validation versus TSI proxy models
Nicola Scafetta & Richard C. Willson

From the paper:

PMOD TSI composite (Fröhlich and Lean 1998; Fröhlich 2004, 2006, 2012) is essentially a theoretical model originally designed to agree with Lean’s TSI proxy model (Fröhlich and Lean 1998). It relies on postulated but experimentally unverified drifts in the ERB record during the ACRIM Gap,and other alterations of the published ERB and ACRIM results, that are not recognized by their original experimental teams and have not been verified by the PMOD by original computations using ERB or ACRIM1 data.

Predicting changes in Solar activity

Here’s a prediction graph I produced a little while ago which seems to be more or less on course:

ap-prediction

It uses the fact that changes in Earth’s length of day seem to precede changes in solar magnetism and sunspot production by several years. The yellow curve was generated by combining Sunspot data with LOD data to create a prediction for Ap out to 2015. The recent burst of sunspot activity has arrived on cue.

Here’s another graph which shows a possible correlation between sunspot activity averaged over the length of the solar cycle, and motion of the solar system’s centre of mass relative to the solar equatorial plane averaged over two Jupiter orbital periods:

What caused the collapse in solar activity at the start of the 1800’s known as the Dalton minimum? Could it be the conjunction of Uranus and Neptune which seems to accompany each of the grand minima? Does that mean we are due another one now?  I’ll investigate that in another post soon.

Why does the average sunspot number fall when the average mass of the planets is heading south? Speculatively,  could it be that the ‘lensing’ of an electro-magnetic effect emanating from the galactic centre diminishes when the planets are ‘on the wrong side of the sun’?

Answers on a postcard, or post your thoughts below.