Cornelis De Jager of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research and Silvia Duhau of the Departamento de Física, Facultad de Ingenieria, Universidad de Buenos Aires have published a new paper in the Journal of Space Weather and Space Climate titled: Sudden transitions and grand variations in the solar dynamo, past and future.
I’m not sure if other bloggers have written about this. If so, here it is again. The paper forecasts solar activity for the current Solar cycle 24, which they expect will peak in May, 2013 with a maximum sunspot number Rmax of 62 ± 12.
More importantly, the authors write (emphasis added):
The subsequent analysis, based on a phase diagram, which is a diagram showing the relation between maximum sunspot numbers and minimum geomagnetic aa index values leads to the conclusion that a new Grand Episode in solar activity has started in 2008.”
and
…we predict that this Grand Episode will be of the Regular Oscillations type, which is the kind of oscillations that also occurred between 1724 and 1924. Previous expectations of a Grand (Maunder-type) Minimum of solar activity cannot be supported. We stress the significance of theHallstatt periodicity for determining the character of the forthcoming Grand Episodes. No Grand Minimum is expected to occur during the millennium that has just started.”
That of course is good news, as the world can ill-afford climate conditions like the ones we saw during the Maunder Minimum – especially with governments racing to prepare for the exact opposite.