A 42 Year Quest to Understand the Solar Dynamo and Predict Solar Cycles

Details A 42 Year Quest to Understand the Solar Dynamo and Predict Solar Cycles A 42 Year Quest to Understand the Solar Dynamo and Predict Solar Cycles

Jun 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006spd....37.3101g&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, SPD meeting #37, #31.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.257

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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.

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