Special Events

SOLAR-B LAUNCH - This is a very exciting time for all of us who have been involved in this mission for over a decade, and also for solar/terrestrial science because we anticipate this mission to open many windows on the behavior and effects of solar magnetic fields that have heretofore been closed to us.

There might be a live webcast of the launch at:

http://www.isas.jaxa.jp/e/countdown/index.shtml

It will occur at 3:00 PM MDT on Friday, 22 September, which is 6:00 AM Saturday 23 September Japan Standard Time. It is launched at dawn to be inserted in the "sun-synchronous" polar orbit that places the satellite in a continual twilight orbit, so that we will be able to view solar phenomena without interruption for 9-10 months out of the year.

The NASA Solar-B website is: http://solarb.msfc.nasa.gov/

PETER GILMAN HALE PRIZE LECTURE AND RECEPTION - Please join us for a Hale Prize Lecture by Peter Gilman. This distinguished award was presented to Peter earlier in the year and he is now bringing the talk to UCAR.

The talk will begin at 3:30 on September 27th in the Mesa Lab Main Seminar Room. You are welcome to join us immediately following the talk for refreshments and celebration of this honor bestowed on Dr. Gilman. RSVP is requested by September 25th. Please contact Amy Knack at 303-497-2174 or knack@ucar.edu.

Title: A 42 year quest to understand the solar dynamo and predict solar cycles-- The 2006 Hale Prize Lecture, with edits and a postscript

Abstract:
For me this quest began in 1964, when I was a graduate student in meteorology at MIT. Most recently I have participated in a collaboration led by Mausumi Dikpati that has successfully simulated and 'predicted' the relative peaks of the past 8 solar cycles, using a 'flux-transport' solar dynamo. We are also 'hot on the trail' of a theory for active longitudes on the sun, that involves global MHD instability of the solar tachocline. Over the 42 years, I have seen the solar dynamo problem declared 'solved' by mean field dynamo theory in the 1970's, followed by near total rejection of this conclusion in the 1980's due to helioseismic measurements of solar rotation at depth, followed by a spectacular comeback in the 1990's to the present, in the form of flux transport models in which meridional circulation is an essential component. I have seen 3D global MHD models for solar convection and differential rotation work well as dynamos, but fail as solar dynamos, yielding backward 'butterfly diagrams', or no butterfly diagrams at all. In the near future, we will search for the limits of skill of axisymmetric flux-transport models to predict details of individual cycles, and we will generalize the theory to include longitude dependence, by which we hope to produce a unified theory of the solar cycle and active longitudes. Since flux-transport dynamos work so well for the sun, they ought to work very well for many other stars.

In a postscript, I will summarize some criticisms raised about our solar cycle prediction work, and give our responses to those criticisms.