Where have all the sunspots gone?

clipped from wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com The sun has gone quiet. Really quiet. It is normal for our sun to have quiet periods between solar cycles, but we’ve seen months and months of next to nothing, and the start of Solar cycle 24 seems to have materialized (as first reported here) then abruptly disappeared. The reverse polarity sunspot that signaled the start of cycle 24 on January 4th, dissolved within two days after that. But the real news is just how quiet the suns magnetic field has been in the past couple of years. From the data provided by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) you can see just how little magnetic field activity there has been. I’ve graphed it below: Some say it is no coincidence that 2008 has seen a drop in global temperature as indicated by several respected temperature indexes�compared to 2007, and that�our sun is also quiet and still not kick starting its internal magentic dynamo.