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Solar 24 cycle…a record breaker in the making
Overview
It appears that the solar maximum phase for solar cycle 24 may have been reached and it is not very impressive. In fact, this solar cycle continues to rank among the weakest on record which continues the recent trend for increasingly weaker cycles. Going back to 1755, there have been only a few solar cycles in the previous 23 that have had a lower number of sunspots during its “maximum” phase (plot below; courtesy Doug Biesecker of NOAA/SWPC). For this reason, many solar researchers are calling this current solar maximum a “mini-max”. Solar cycle 24 began after an unusually deep solar minimum that lasted from 2007 to 2009. In fact, in 2008 and 2009, there were almost no sunspots, a very unusual situation that had not happened for almost a century.
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