Weakening of Earths magnetic field due to geomagnetic excursion

[Tylerjt1005]

Has anyone else noticed that weaker and weaker solar activity has triggered stronger and stronger storms here on earth in recent times?  

[Marcel de Bont]

Welcome. This is borderline unproven theories... because I am not sure if your claim holds any water. Can you back up your statement with facts and data?

[Christopher Shriver]

I don't think a single part of this is agreeable. Here's something to check: 

The Potsdam Ap represents periods of heightened geomagnetic disturbance. Cross-check the blue line with the black and red lines. It would appear that more geomagnetic activity occurs alongside higher F10.7 flux. So, based on the data, no.

[MinYoongi]

3 hours ago, Marcel de Bont said:

Welcome. This is borderline unproven theories... because I am not sure if your claim holds any water. Can you back up your statement with facts and data?

 

3 hours ago, Marcel de Bont said:

Welcome. This is borderline unproven theories... because I am not sure if your claim holds any water. Can you back up your statement with facts and data?

It’s from Ben davidson again. He claims since the magnetic field is weakening, not as much impact is needed for strong storming and red/deep aurora. I don’t like Ben Davidson and his doomsday cult.

[Tylerjt1005]

10 hours ago, Christopher Shriver said:

I don't think a single part of this is agreeable. Here's something to check: 

The Potsdam Ap represents periods of heightened geomagnetic disturbance. Cross-check the blue line with the black and red lines. It would appear that more geomagnetic activity occurs alongside higher F10.7 flux. So, based on the data, no.

Thank you for your swift response, I apreciate the data. 

[Bedreamon]

11 hours ago, Marcel de Bont said:

Welcome. This is borderline unproven theories... because I am not sure if your claim holds any water. Can you back up your statement with facts and data?

The claim, if I remember correctly, comes from a self-taught YouTuber, so... IMO it can automatically be thrown out. Man I hate thinking about when I was addicted to that crap.

That said, I'm glad OP joined this forum because I think it's a pretty good resource on the sun, space weather, etcetera.

[baldr]

Would you be able to provide where you got this data so I can take a look at a longer timescale? I would be interested in more over a 11 year or so period, as that chart seems quite useful. I feel 1 year is hard to tell by eye anyway.

[Christopher Shriver]

3 hours ago, baldr said:

Would you be able to provide where you got this data so I can take a look at a longer timescale? I would be interested in more over a 11 year or so period, as that chart seems quite useful. I feel 1 year is hard to tell by eye anyway.

The website and chart are not mine, so you'd have to contact Jan for details. The chart itself is his, while the data is in various places that I can't retrieve at the moment

[3gMike]

1 hour ago, Christopher Shriver said:

The website and chart are not mine, so you'd have to contact Jan for details. The chart itself is his, while the data is in various places that I can't retrieve at the moment

Jan does publish an archive of data going back to January 2003. The format changes over the period, but Ap and 10.7cm flux are recorded for the whole series. https://solen.info/solar/old_reports/

[Philalethes]

6 hours ago, baldr said:

Would you be able to provide where you got this data so I can take a look at a longer timescale? I would be interested in more over a 11 year or so period, as that chart seems quite useful. I feel 1 year is hard to tell by eye anyway.

F10.7 data dating back to 1947 can be found here. Ap and related indices dating back to 1932 can be found here (also contains the F10.7 values from 1947). Sunspot data can be found here (monthly counts back to 1749, daily back to 1818). The geomagnetic axial dipole strength according to IGRF-13 can be found here.

[baldr]

Thanks for that. Using the last source it seems we have had a drop in field strength from around 34,000nt in 1945 to 29,300 2025 if I am not reading incorrectly, equatorial. So approximately a 15% drop. There does seem to be an acceleration to this, but not massively steep.

If I am misinterpreting anything let me know, I will have to check your other sources and models as well. But just from this I would imagine space weather should be having a larger impact than 70 years ago.

Thanks for all the links as well, greatly appreciated.

Edited May 5 by baldr

[Philalethes]

1 hour ago, baldr said:

Thanks for that. Using the last source it seems we have had a drop in field strength from around 34,000nt in 1945 to 29,300 2025 if I am not reading incorrectly, equatorial. So approximately a 15% drop. There does seem to be an acceleration to this, but not massively steep.

If I am misinterpreting anything let me know, I will have to check your other sources and models as well.

You have indeed misinterpreted something there; what you seem to have selected is the magnetic field strength at a given location (seemingly using the default longitude). The overall dipole strength is the "Dipole Moment" checkbox, and will be the same for a given year independently of coordinates and altitude. I've taken the liberty to plot it here:

The first value there is 31224.5 nT in 1945 and the last 29731.2 nT in 2024, which represents roughly a 4.8% drop. There isn't really any significant evidence of any acceleration in the weakening given how the slope you see in the beginning is just one of several small inflections in models dating further back, and how it's sloping the other way towards the end. On the Wikipedia page on the geomagnetic field there's also a plot which includes a couple of the models which go back further to give a better impression of this:

From looking at reconstructions of the field even further back, we can also get an idea of the long-term development, and how we seem to currently be rebounding (regressing to the mean) from a period of the field being significantly stronger than average; the past 12,000 years:

And 100,000 years back:

And 2 million years:

Note that this last one reads right to left, where the present time is all the way to the left.

1 hour ago, baldr said:

But just from this I would imagine space weather should be having a larger impact than 70 years ago.

Well, even with the above misinterpretation in mind, there is still the weakening of ~5% in the last 80 years or so; it's not entirely unreasonable to think that there could be a slight increase in the impact of Solar activity on geomagnetic activity due to that, but whether that is actually the case, and if so how large of an effect that really is, is something that still remains to be proven, and isn't very straightforward to quantify.

Edited May 5 by Philalethes
typo

[Bedreamon]

3 hours ago, Philalethes said:

there is still the weakening of ~5% in the last 80 years or so

That's something that's been noted by NASA and ESA, as this ESA article says it declined 9% over the past 200 years. I... don't exactly know what that means in terms of solar storms like OP was asking about, but it's worth mentioning imo.

resisting the urge to not fall back into the rabbit hole

Edited May 6 by Bedreamon

[baldr]

Thanks for the info and clearing that up on the dipole moment. That data does seem to line up more with ESA's mentions of 15% over 150 years etc. I will have a further look into the details. Would be interesting to see if any particular areas have had bigger drops and are more likely / less likely to see Aurora's in particular.

Edited May 6 by baldr

[Philalethes]

7 hours ago, Bedreamon said:

That's something that's been noted by NASA and ESA, as this ESA article says it declined 9% over the past 200 years. I... don't exactly know what that means in terms of solar storms like OP was asking about, but it's worth mentioning imo.

Yes, the fact that the geomagnetic field has weakened slightly over that time period is universally accepted among geoscientists; but it's important to note a few things, like what I've mentioned above:

• The context in which that has been happening, as it seems to be a movement down from a very high peak in strength, thus looking more like a "regression to the mean" rather than the beginnings of a geomagnetic excursion (although we can't know for sure at this point, of course, but such an excursion would take at least a few thousand years to occur anyway).
   
• The rate at which it's happening, which does not seem to be accelerating, contrary to what's often claimed, and which is also lower than what it's often quoted as by people who are trying to exaggerate it.
   
• That we'd still need some clear evidence for increased geomagnetic activity due to this, and that even if does happen should not be expected to be much more than the weakening itself. There could of course be nonlinear dynamics at work, but they are just as likely (in fact, in the context of such systems, often even more likely) to work the other way, i.e. to have a dampening effect, so that e.g. a 5% weakening of the dipole strength would only lead to a 3% increase in geomagnetic activity from Solar activity with the exact same parameters; just a hypothetical, obviously, and as mentioned above it's difficult to quantify that kind of thing due to how complex the parameters of a given bout of Solar activity can be.

7 hours ago, baldr said:

That data does seem to line up more with ESA's mentions of 15% over 150 years etc

That seems a bit exaggerated, as it's closer to 7-8% in that time, and roughly 15% down from the local peak around 300 years ago; in the article Bedreamon mentions above ESA states a weakening of ~9% in 200 years, which is more in line with the evidence, so I'd be curious to know where you've got that number from.

[baldr]

Regarding the 15% number: https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/FutureEO/Swarm/Our_protective_shield

I believe this was also mentioned Rune Floberghagen in an interview he did.

Edited May 6 by baldr

[Philalethes]

14 minutes ago, baldr said:

Regarding the 15% number: https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/FutureEO/Swarm/Our_protective_shield

I believe this was also mentioned Rune Floberghagen in an interview he did.

I see; it would be interesting to know what the author is referring to there, and whether it's referring to something else than the overall field strength or whether it's just a mistake. In any case, the IGRF and gufm1 models are definitely the best contemporary models of the geomagnetic field in recent times, so in terms of the overall field strength the development they show should be the most accurate.

I sent Rune an email about the article and that figure asking for some clarification, perhaps he'll take the time to clear it up.

[Christopher Shriver]

We must remember that astrophysical stuff occurs on a scale of time that is very much larger than any individual's lifespan, let alone a species. The undertone of the premise here was rooted in fearmongering, due to compacting and conflating astrophysical data in their alarmist narratives. If the conclusion of a presentation is to feel an emotion, and that feeling then repels you from the subject matter, this is a failure of communicating the information given by the aforementioned data in a transparent, digestible, and thought-provoking manner. Just throwing it out there that the responsible internet personalities have a deplorable sense of ethics, based on the apparent inability to regard peers as credible, and criticism as valid. We've seen stonewalling and gaslighting here quite a bit, so I applaud each and every one in the community for discussing these things as plainly as possible. It will go a long way to clear up the confusion instilled by the aforementioned narratives.

tl;dr Sensationalism might provoke curiosity, but the hubris I mention often leads to targeting the scientifically illiterate with verbose jargon and emotionally-charged delivery. It is here that discourse shines light on fact vs. fiction, and also facilitates a meta discussion on how and why these missteps of understanding came to be.

[Philalethes]

@Jeffrey Dikkes:

If I were you I'd read through some of the posts in this thread if you're interested in some actual facts about the geomagnetic field. One fact in particular to note is that the field has only weakened ~3% over the last 50 years, only ~1% in the last 20 years. The field is also stronger than it's been for most of the last few ten thousand years, and even couple millions of years. You can see some of the plots of this above.

Edited May 10 by Philalethes
typo

[NewMexTex]

On 5/4/2024 at 1:17 AM, Tylerjt1005 said:

Has anyone else noticed that weaker and weaker solar activity has triggered stronger and stronger storms here on earth in recent times?  

Correlation of solar events changing things like magnetic fields to earth weather, by using data, is professional academic suicide.

Edited May 10 by NewMexTex

[Philalethes]

28 minutes ago, NewMexTex said:

Correlation of solar events changing things like magnetic fields to earth weather, by using data, is professional academic suicide.

Not even remotely true, there are plenty of papers published on such topics; but the results are very inconclusive, and any such correlation is likely weak at best.

[Áine Anderson]

I think this paper is an interesting read when ever I mull this topic over.  It seems a smidge out there but certainly worth considering in my opinion Quasi-periodic fractal patterns in geomagnetic reversals, geological activity, and astronomical events

Edited May 11 by Áine Anderson
the link was broken

[Glowman]

Don't know if it connected but:

I saw information about upward movement of charged particles along magnetic lines from the Earth (along with ongoing Auroras)

Such movement causes red/pink auroras (we saw 2 such events this year for the last year and 1 for the 2023 and none for previous 15 years at least. Latitude 50⁰ North).

Edited May 11 by Glowman

[Philalethes]

30 minutes ago, Glowman said:

Don't know if it connected but:

I saw information about upward movement of charged particles along magnetic lines from the Earth (along with ongoing Auroras)

Such movement causes red/pink auroras (we saw 2 such events this year for the last year and 1 for the 2023 and none for previous 15 years at least. Latitude 50⁰ North).

It's very unlikely to be connected to the weakening magnetic field, because the field has only weakened ~1% in the last 20 years. Much more likely is the fact that SC24 was very weak, so it's pretty much been about 20 years since we've had some really strong geomagnetic activity; there wasn't even a single instance of the Dst reaching <=-250 nT in all of SC24.

Edited May 11 by Philalethes
typo