DAILY SUN ACTIVITIES – 19 July 09
Courtesy of www.spaceweather.com U.S.A.
Daily Sun: 19 July 09
Solar wind
speed: 286.0 km/sec
density: 2.3 protons/cm3
Updated: Today at 1146 UT
Spotless Days
Current Stretch: 7 days
2009 total: 149 days (76%)
Since 2004: 660 days
Typical Solar Min: 485 days
Updated 17 July 2009
Interplanetary Mag. Field
Btotal: 2.3 nT
Bz: 1.6 nT south
Updated: Today at 1146 UT
WAITING FOR THE ECLIPSE:
On July 22nd, the longest solar eclipse of the 21st century will take place in Asia.
Shanghai is the largest city in China with a population greater than 20 million. On Wednesday, the Moon’s shadow will linger over the great metropolis for nearly six full minutes, giving residents a stunning and lengthy view of the Sun’s ghostly corona. In addition to Shanghai, the path of totality crosses a number of other large cities in India and China–e.g., Surat, Vadodara, Bhopal, Varanasi, Chengdu, Chongqing, Wuhan, Hefei, Hangzhou–each with populations numbering in the millions. This could be the best-observed solar eclipse in human history.
From Climate Science: Roger Pielke Sr. Research Group News
The 2009 El Niño [UPDATE 7/16/2009: SEE ALSO (thanks to John Christy for altering us to this link)]
On the website The Blackboard, there is a plot of the latest sea surface temperature anomalies from the Hadley Center. It has jumped dramatically in just one month. The reason is clearly related to the 2009 El Niño which has developed quickly over the last several months as seen in the ECMWF ocean data (see).
The ECMWF vertical cross-sections (see, see, see and see) provide a useful perspective in that substantial cool (as well as warm) anomalies exist at depth. The El Niño signal is clear in the equatorial cross-section.
There are two messages in this data. First, the sudden development of this El Niño illustrates that it is dominated by ocean and atmospheric circulation changes, not an annual global average radiative forcing. Second, the regional variation in the patterning of heating further reinforces that climate is dominated by spatial variations in circulation features, and not a global-annual average surface temperature trend or other climate metric averaged on this space scale (see and see).
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