Dead quiet sun. Where is my solar max?

As the Media stated a few weeks ago, we were suposed to se some very active Sun right now. Yet the sun is dead quet:

www.swpc.noaa.gov...

Very curious why this really happens, and of course it makes me wonder : if this is our solar maximum, what shall we expect in 5-6 years from now? Is there a mini-ice around the corner? maybe all the doom lovers finally have something serious about to happen

reply to post by Romanian

I guess that dirty snowball ISON must have cooled it down ....It sure is quiet though ..hard to say what is going on but we may end up with a cooler than normal winter this year ....Not much of a difference between cold and cold though ....

Sun is moving towards Solar Grand Minimum, which means its cycles stay same, but with less activity. It also means colder weather here on Earth. Sun has been in "Modern Maximum" since 1900, and I guess its ending soon.



There has always been colder periods when Sun is at Grand minimum.

As most people know, solar cycles occur on an 11 year (+/-) cycle. However, there seems to be a larger cycle of high-activity solar cycles and low-activity solar cycles.

Solar cycles have been observed and studied for over 250 years, and it seems that there have been swings of groups of high-activity cycles and groups of low-activity cycles, as seen in this chart dating back to the 1750s that charts the number of sunspots (which is directly related to solar activity):

Source

As this chart shows, there seems to be spans of several solar cycles of low activity and spans of cycles with greater sunspot activity (albeit an aberration appears to have occurred with relatively low activity during the 1964 maximum compared to the maximum before and after that 1964 solar max). The latest peak of activity seemed to occur in the last half of the last century, and it seems we are again headed to a period of cycles with lower activity.