Solar Flux to Bottom Out in July as Cycle 24 Gets Closer

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Environment Center (SEC) released their monthly forecasts of sunspot number and 10.7 cm radio flux, including high and low bounds to their forecasts. The SEC forecasts that the smoothed sunspot number reached its low value of 11.7 in March 2007, and predicts that the solar flux will reach its low of 75.4 this month. This is the fourth month in a row that the SEC predicts the solar flux will bottom out in July. Based on the SEC predictions, this is probably at the bottom of Cycle 23 and extremely close to the beginning of Cycle 24. Two events will mark the beginning of the next sunspot cycle: The observation of the first opposite magnetic polarity sunspots compared to Cycle 23 sunspot polarity, and the observation high solar latitude sunspots — the Cycle 23 sunspots are now very near the solar equator. The SEC predictions table and sunspot number and solar flux prediction graphs are available on the SEC’s Web site — The Daily DX

http://www.arrl.org/?artid=7568

This entry was posted on July 9, 2007 at 11:44 am and is filed under DX, ARRL Web Extra. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.