** NOTE** The purpose of this post is two-fold: (a) to introduce you to the NASA SOHO Observatory website, with its wealth of fascinating solar imaging and movies (who wouldn't like to watch a comet hit the sun?), and (b) to publish my growing suspicion that the sun affects global climate, but that we aren't going to acknowledge that, at the governmental level, because we can't legislate the sun and therefore cannot use it as any sort of population or economic control. You'll see the same things said about the most common (by orders of magnitude) greenhouse gas on Earth: water vapor. Can't control it, ergo, we're going to ignore it.
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I fell in love with the SOHO Observatory in 2003 October/November; it was the year of the California wildfires, ENRON's browning out of the state, and — on one alarming morning, around All Saints' Day — my eldest son, Wry Jr., and I saw a sunspot through the smoke hanging in the air over the Coachella Valley.  The smoke acted as a filter, but the spot itself was enormous: probably a quarter to a third of the sun's width, larger than a thousand Earths.

I found the SOHO Observatory within a week, online, a satellite hanging waaay out in space, pointed at the sun.

What it saw was this.

The sun is a roiling mass of spinning plasma; sunspots throwing off flares and plumes and bursts. The images are taken about once an hour, from a distance about halfway to the sun. Try and grasp how fast the sun is rotating. The green-filtered image highlights sunspots (the bright patches) and the energies seething around and blowing out of them.

The first sunspot you will notice is "south of the equator," bursting with energies.

The sunspot observed coming around to the "front" of the sun about 10/23, just above the "equator" of the picture, is nicely rambunctious. You can see flares emanating from it even before it presents itself.

That is the sunspot my son and I will see with the naked eye about November 1st.

The camera pans and begins tracking the spot on its revolution around the surface of the sun. On 10/28, this spot flares directly at the camera. The "scratches" that almost immediately obscure the view for hours are the signature of atomic bombardment of the satellite from the spot's flareup. It will "pop" a couple of more times as it spins; October 30, and very spectacularly on November 3rd, as it nears the horizon.

On November 4th, as "our" sunspot turned away form the Earth, you will see a flash that was a flare literally off the scale of energy measurements. A nice diversion is to speculate what would have happened to us if it had exploded outward a day or two earlier, when the spot (like the barrel of a gun) was pointed at us.

Fast forward 6 years. The sun now looks, for two years, has looked pretty much like this:



We are in the nadir of the 11-year sunspot cycle, a lull between sunspot activities. NASA drily observes:

Early records of sunspots indicate that the Sun went through a period of inactivity in the late 17th century. Very few sunspots were seen on the Sun from about 1645 to 1715 (38 kb JPEG image). Although the observations were not as extensive as in later years, the Sun was in fact well observed during this time and this lack of sunspots is well documented. This period of solar inactivity also corresponds to a climatic period called the "Little Ice Age" when rivers that are normally ice-free froze and snow fields remained year-round at lower altitudes. There is evidence that the Sun has had similar periods of inactivity in the more distant past. The connection between solar activity and terrestrial climate is an area of on-going research.

There is also this tidbit:

MSFC Solar Physics Branch members Wilson, Hathaway, and Reichmann have studied the sunspot record for characteristic behavior that might help in predicting future sunspot activity. Our current predictions of solar activity for the next few years can be found at this link. Although sunspots themselves produce only minor effects on solar emissions, the magnetic activity that accompanies the sunspots can produce dramatic changes in the ultraviolet and soft x-ray emission levels. These changes over the solar cycle have important consequences for the Earth's upper atmosphere.

Here's the image for recent sunspot activity:

You can see, at 2009-2010, we seem to be "in the trough."

What will happen when the sun starts ramping up its energy levels again? I wonder. And how does this activity tie in to global weather/climate?

After all, you see, it's The Sun. And I'm betting that it has quite a lot more to do with any warming/cooling trends than CO2, or any other life-giving gases being exchanged on the planet's surface.