Upton, L. A., & Hathaway, D. H. (2018). An updated Solar Cycle 25 prediction with AFT: The Modern Minimum. Geophysical Research Letters, 45, 8091– 8095. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL078387
Abstract
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Plain Language Summary
After the exceptionally weak Solar Cycle 24 (SC24), there is considerable interest in accurately predicting the amplitude of the coming Solar Cycle 25 (SC25). In 2016, the Advective Flux Transport (AFT) Model was used to make such a prediction. We now have two additional years of solar data. Here we compare the results of the previous prediction to the observations that have since occurred. We then use the additional two years of data to create an updated prediction, with a much smaller uncertainty. We predict that SC25 will be about slightly smaller (∼95%) the strength of SC24, making it the weakest solar cycle in the last hundred years. We also predict that,like SC24, SC25 will be preceded by a long extended solar minimum. Finally, these results indicate that we are now in the midst of a Modern Gleissberg Minimum.
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This would make Solar Cycle 25 the smallest cycle in the last 100 years. This indicates that the weak Cycle 24 is not an isolated weak cycle, but rather the onset of the modern Gleissburg (1939) minimum, which will include Cycle 25—at present this is akin to the last Gleissburg minimum (SC12, SC13, and SC14), which occurred in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Unfortunately, we will need to wait another 10–15 years before we will know if the Sun will go into a deeper minimum state (e.g., the Dalton or Maunder minima, or somewhere in between) or if it will recover as it did following the last Gleissberg minimum...
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