The Sun has passed into a new 11-year activity cycle — but scientists predict the new cycle's intensity, which will peak in 2025, should be almost identical to the last.
He says solar cycle modeling has improved over the last decade or so, making it easier to make predictions. But still, the last time around, the group didn't do too badly.
"We were very close in predicting Solar Cycle 24. It was within what we consider to be our error bar of a sunspot number of plus or minus ten," says Biesecker."We did get the timing of maximum wrong. And the reason for that was because we treated the Sun as one big ball of gas, but the hemispheres, the south and the north, behave independently. The last solar cycle, they were out of phase with each other more so than ever before, which sort of ruined our forecast a bit.
Besides the obvious need to protect the electrical grid and other important technology infrastructures, government officials also want to understand space weather as they try to"A trip to the moon can include periods of time when our astronauts will not be protected from space weather by the Earth's magnetic field," says
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