Forecast and backcast of the solar cycles

TL;DR

This paper models solar cycles as a forced and damped harmonic oscillator, estimating key parameters from historical data to forecast future cycles and assess past minima, revealing persistent oscillatory behavior and ruling out imminent grand minima.

Contribution

It introduces a novel harmonic oscillator model for solar cycles, estimating physical parameters from data, and uses autoregressive methods to forecast and backcast solar activity, including the Maunder minimum.

Findings

Amplitude and frequency of the sinusoidal component are constant across cycles.

The transient part's amplitude is phase-locked with the sinusoidal part.

The upcoming solar cycle 25 will have similar amplitude to cycle 24.

Abstract

Solar cycle is modeled as a forced and damped harmonic oscillator and the amplitudes, frequencies, phases and decay factors of such a harmonic oscillator are estimated by non-linear fitting the equation of sinusoidal and transient parts to the sunspot and irradiance (proxy for the sunspot) data for the years 1700-2008. We find that:(i) amplitude and frequency (or period of $\sim$11 yr) of the sinusoidal part remain constant for all the solar cycles; (ii) the amplitude of the transient part is phase locked with the phase of the sinusoidal part; (iii) for all the cycles, the period and decay factor (that is much less than 1) of the transient part remain approximately constant. The constancy of the amplitudes and the frequencies of the sinusoidal part and a very small decay factor from the transient part suggests that the solar activity cycle mainly consists of a persistent oscillatory part that might be compatible with long-period ($\sim$22 yr) Alfven oscillations. For all the cycles, with the estimated physical parameters (amplitudes, phases and periods) and, by an autoregressive model, we forecast (especially for coming solar cycle 25) and backcast (to check whether Maunder minimum type solar activity exists or not) the solar cycles. We find that amplitude of coming solar cycle 25 is almost same as the amplitude of the previous solar cycle 24. We also find that sun might not have experienced a deep Maunder minimum (MM) type of activity during 1645-1700 AD corroborating some of the paleoclimatic inferences and, MM type of activity will not be imminent in near future, until at least 200 years.