Abstract
We present a data-driven version of the solar cycle model of Lemerle and Charbonneau (Astrophys. J. 834, 133; 2017), which we use to forecast properties of the upcoming sunspot Cycle 25. The two free parameters of the model are fixed by requiring the model to reproduce Cycle 24 upon being driven by active region data for Cycle 23. Our forecasting model incorporates self-consistently the expected fluctuations associated with stochastic variations in properties of emerging active regions, most notably the scatter in the tilt angle of the line segment joining the opposite polarity focii of bipolar magnetic regions, as embodied in Joy’s law. By carrying out ensemble forecasts with statistically independent realizations of active region parameters, we can produce error bars that capture the impact of this physical source of fluctuations. We forecast a smoothed monthly international sunspot number (version 2.0) peaking at \(89^{+29}_{-14}\) in year \(2025.3^{+0.89}_{-1.05}\), with a 6 month onset delay in the northern hemisphere, but a peak amplitude 20% higher than in the southern hemisphere.
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Notes
This database is available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/solardynamo. The version used in the present work was downloaded in June 2018.
These data are available at www.sidc.be/silso/datafiles.
These data are available at http://wso.stanford.edu.
The forecasts of Iijima et al. (2017) and Upton and Hathaway (2018) are not explicitly for the ISSN, but rather for the dipole at the end of Cycle 24. Here this (and the associated error estimate) is converted to ISSN by assuming that the ratio of Cycle 24/25 ISSN is the same as the ratio of dipole strength at the minimum preceding each cycle, as these authors themselves do to estimate the Cycle 25 amplitude. Gopalswamy et al. (2018), Hawkes and Berger (2018), and Petrovay et al. (2018) do not include a quantitative error estimate with their forecasts. The Svalgaard forecast is from a presentation at the March 2018 SORCE-TSIS Sun-Climate Symposium, and is as yet unpublished but is included here with permission.
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Acknowledgements
We wish to express our gratitude to A. Yeates et A. Muñoz-Jaramillo for producing and maintaining their publicly available Cycle 23 – 24 active region database, again to A. Muñoz-Jaramillo for very useful discussions, and to an anonymous referee for some useful comments and suggestions. This work was supported by the Discovery Grant Program of Canada’s Natural Science and Engineering Research Council.
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Labonville, F., Charbonneau, P. & Lemerle, A. A Dynamo-based Forecast of Solar Cycle 25. Sol Phys 294, 82 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-019-1480-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-019-1480-0