Word: sunspots
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...phase. It's got quite a way to go." Solar buffs are speculating it might approach the violence reached by the 1957-58 maximum, which touched off five disruptive geomagnetic superstorms and vivid auroral displays. Says astronomer Donald Neidig at the National Solar Observatory outpost on Sacramento Peak, near Sunspot, N. Mex.: "We can't rule out a record breaker...
...great flares of March were not isolated events. Nine other major outbursts and hundreds of smaller ones were recorded during the two weeks it took for the sunspot region to rotate out of view. In the months since, as the sun moves erratically toward its maximum, several flares have been observed every...
...years since, by tabulating sunspot records going back to the early 18th century and using improved telescopes, satellites, advanced instruments and modern theory, scientists have become ever more familiar with the bizarre dance of the sunspots. Each cycle begins when spots show up in both the northern and southern hemispheres about 35 degrees away from the solar equator. As the cycle matures and the older sunspots fade away (some last only a few hours, others for weeks and even months), new and more numerous spots appear at lower latitudes. Toward the end of the cycle, diminished in number, they appear...
...late 1970s. NASA's Seasat 1, Tiros N and Nimbus 7 satellites took indirect measurements of ocean conditions, such as surface wind speed and direction, by gathering data on radiation scattered by waves. At first, scientists had to correct their data for errors introduced by everything from sunspot activity to changes in the ozone levels of the upper atmosphere. "It wasn't just getting bigger computers, better instruments, better physics or better computer languages," says Robert Evans, a physicist at the University of Miami's Remote Sensing Laboratory. "We needed all of those...
...while most scientists agree that atmospheric chemistry and dynamics are major causes, the increased scrutiny of the Antarctic atmosphere following the discovery of the hole has seriously undercut the sunspot theory. Data from Punta Arenas, says Robert Watson, a NASA scientist involved in that study, made the verdict all but final. Nitrogen and ozone levels were down, but concentrations of chlorine monoxide were 100 times as great as equivalent levels at temperate latitudes. Says Watson: "We can forget the solar theories. We can no longer debate that chlorine monoxide exists and that its abundance is high enough to destroy ozone...