There it was about two months ahead of time! A spot on the sun’s surface about the size of the earth: small for sunspots. It was at a northern altitude and it had a reversed polarity. Sunspot #981 to be official. It showed up on January 4th of 2008. Doug Biesecker of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado, likens sunspot 981 “to the first robin of spring. There’s still snow on the ground, but the seasons are changing. We predicted that Solar Cycle 24 would begin around March 2008 and it looks like we weren’t far off,” he says.
It goes without saying that the sun is critical to life on earth, but just how much so, few consider.
Solar storms can disable satellites that we depend on for weather forecasts and GPS navigation. It would be a bad omen to have an X-20 something solar flare in the midst of a warsays Hathaway. Radio bursts from solar flares can directly interfere with cell phone reception while coronal mass ejections (CMEs) hitting Earth can cause electrical power outages. And there’s a lot more trouble that could come our way.
With the new cycle comes the low activity portion of the cycle. Somewhere towards the end of 2012 we would be entering the peak of this cycle’s activity. Get the message? 
Solar storms also have a big effect on polar regions of our planet. Airplanes which fly over the poles during solar storms can experience radio blackouts, navigation errors and computer reboots all caused by space radiation. Avoiding the poles during solar storms solves the problem, but it costs extra time, money and fuel to take the long way around- even at just $70 a barrel oil, but especially at $147 a barrel.
Of course our government and most are doing all they can to get a better handle on what all of this means to us here on planet earth.
NASA is launching Solar Dynamics Observatory. “SDO is a very special observatory,” says project scientist Dean Pesnell at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “Using a technique called helioseismic imaging, the spacecraft will be able to look inside the sun where solar activity begins. SDO will join SOHO, STEREO, Hinode and other missions already in orbit to improve our understanding of solar storms and lay the groundwork for better space weather forecasts.”
But, SDO is still about a year away from launch. Cycle #24 should be gearing up by that time.
