Overlapping Magnetic Activity Cycles and the Sunspot Number: Forecasting Sunspot Cycle 25 Amplitude

June 11, 2021 / Dr.Tony Phillips

June 10, 2021: Something big may be about to happen on the sun. “We call it the Termination Event,” says Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), “and it’s very, very close to happening.”

If you’ve never heard of the Termination Event, you’re not alone. Many researchers have never heard of it either. It’s a relatively new idea in solar physics championed by McIntosh and colleague Bob Leamon of the University of Maryland – Baltimore County. According to the two scientists, vast bands of magnetism are drifting across the surface of the sun. When oppositely-charged bands collide at the equator, they annihilate (or “terminate”). There’s no explosion; this is magnetism, not anti-matter. Nevertheless, the Termination Event is a big deal. It can kickstart the next solar cycle into a higher gear.

“If the Terminator Event happens soon, as we expect, new Solar Cycle 25 could have a magnitude that rivals the top few since record-keeping began,” says McIntosh.

This is, to say the least, controversial. Most solar physicists believe that Solar Cycle 25 will be weak, akin to the anemic Solar Cycle 24 which barely peaked back in 2012-2013. Orthodox models of the sun’s inner magnetic dynamo favor a weak cycle and do not even include the concept of “terminators.”

“What can I say?” laughs McIntosh. “We’re heretics!”

The researchers outlined their reasoning in a December 2020 paper in the research journal Solar Physics. Looking back over 270 years of sunspot data, they found that Terminator Events divide one solar cycle from the next, happening approximately every 11 years. Emphasis on approximately. The interval between terminators ranges from 10 to 15 years, and this is key to predicting the solar cycle.
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The Termination Event

Research paper:

Overlapping Magnetic Activity Cycles and the Sunspot Number: Forecasting Sunspot Cycle 25 Amplitude

If these scientists are right, the next solar cycle could be the strongest we have ever had since we began to observe solar activity.

The "Termination Event" is described as oppositely-charged magnetic bands from the sun colliding at the equator annihilate each other. There is no explosion, but nonetheless these scientists found that the longer the termination event lasts, it makes the next solar cycle weaker. But what we are seeing now is the opposite. The termination event has started and is accelerating faster than the scientists have seen since we started observing the Sun. If they are right our next Solar Cycle, number 25, could be the strongest one we have seen so far.

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Solar Cycle 25 is shaping up to be the opposite. Instead of a long interval, it appears to be coming on the heels of a very short one, only 10 years since the Terminator Event that began Solar Cycle 24. Previous solar cycles with such short intervals have been among the strongest in recorded history.
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The Termination Event

a reply to: ElectricUniverse

I'm afraid our member enement beat you to it. Here's the link to his discussion, it's already 2 pages in.

It is an interesting topic.

It's June 12 here in Tokyo and it feels like the start of fall. The only thing that I believe in that when the weather takes a "collapse " or as people are calling it these days " climate change" , they are hiding what lost civilizations faced and that is a sudden change of climate decimating much of the world populations.
This probably goes well within the deserts being changed to tropical areas being changed. We have to look at the growth of nature like trees is maybe the indication of how fast the weather can be destructive to everything on this Earth.

I studied weather and it's relation to the solar cycle years ago trying to figure out what was happening.

I found an article that kind of explained it well, but that link was saved on my last computer that had a hard drive failure.

Basically it tallied a lot of what I had been reading....I will try to explain it.

During the solar minimum, energy just flows out of the sun evenly, here on earth it means possible hotter weather as it interacts with the planet.

During the solar max, the magnetic field increases sucking the energy back into the sun. Once the energy builds up, it creates flares and the energy is released in bursts from sunspots, causing concentrated pulses of energy containing bursts to eject into the solar system. If they hit your planet it can cause northern lights and cause charges to build up in power lines causing problems. It also can cause increased ground current bursts which backfeed into houses.

The weather during a solar max can actually be cooler if the coronal mass ejections and bursts do not hit the earth because the energy is less in the rays, the sun can be dimmer if the CMEs are on the other side of the sun a lot. Global warming has a lot to do with the solar cycle. A strong solar max can mean cooler summers sometimes There may or may not be more severe storms, it depends on the location of the sunspots.

I may not have this all correct, it has been eight or nine years since I did all that research on the solar cycle. I read a lot of articles on this and understand why there is so much controversy with predictions on what happens or can possibly happen during the max and minimums. Scientists studying this often have opposite predictions.

I only found a couple of articles that explained this well, most people do not have the total knowledge to predict what may occur but there are some out there in this field that have had a major interest in this and have tracked this for many decades and realized a predictable pattern was emerging about the time I was researching. During this next max, this theory may get proven if these older guys are not ignored and the right group of scientists follows through with this theory to verify it. If they do, they will be able to better predict if this will follow through. There is a major cycle to the sun too and that is not influenced by what we do on earth. Being a very hot time here on earth could be related to the lowering of the solar cycles strength, more direct energy could be hitting the earth with a weaker cycle to create hotter weather patterns than normal.

I only can state what I have read and I looked at a lot of evaluations in the hundreds of articles I read by specialists in this years ago. One guy was very excited because of how his research could lead to a better prediction of weather trends...hopefully I can find his research this cycle, I do not remember his name.

These scientists notice patterns then do follow up research to verify their hypothesis. This guys stuff was a theory, with evidence to back it. After the coming cycle is completed, it may be adopted as real if there is proof that the pattern holds true.....then it will be taught in schools more. There are multiple theories and hypothesises out there but that pattern they talked about in the articles I read, maybe a tenth of the total articles I read addressed that theory, and I think that they may be on to something there that can help us predict global heat cycles. The people touting climate change from CO2 are blowing hot air but of course, those jets in the sky can effect things poorly too. There are multiple causes of what we are noticing and CO2 levels are a part of it, we should not be flying all over and messing with the environments ability to repair itself. I think that the unnatural and concentrated natural chemicals and microbes scientists are creating is the worst thing contributing to global warming, taking away the earths ability to repair itself is in essence a creation of scientists creating chemistry and cutting down forests to supply people's wants and desires. Greed is a major factor, and our factories death dating products sure is not helping, we do not need new junk that only lasts a few years before going out of style or becoming obsolete. Science isn't fixing the destruction to our ecosystem, it is making it worse.

Having cows in the fields eating grass is not hurting the environment, science created the tools to make processing plants more accessable and creating technology that goes obsolete is just making things worse. Those idiots touting climate change can't see that if we had thousands of small farms where animals ate naturally and their waste was spread out evenly, there would be less destruction of our environment. Chemical farming is not the answer, those chemicals wind up hurting the environment.

Back to the sun...in the next ten years there will be some new discoveries coming out to either verify or discount new theories. Of course, big money does not want us to know the truth and these days people would rather accept a lie than to be inconvenienced.

a reply to: rickymouse

If you look at a two-mile deep section of ice core material, it would beg the question why are governments so complacent The cycles repeat like clockwork, warming is followed by cooling. The why, does not really matter if the pattern is consistent? Even in an interglacial serious cooling happens, Just one week of crap weather in Ottawa left one power grid standing. The rain bands move down to the Sahara, and northern Europe is stuffed. Same in the US the desert gets the rains.The rest is frozen tundra.