f you like solar minimum, good news: It could last for years. That was one of the predictions issued last week by an international panel of experts who gathered at NOAA's annual Space Weather Workshop to forecast the next solar cycle. If the panel is correct, already-low sunspot counts will reach a nadir sometime between July 2019 and Sept 2020, followed by a slow recovery toward a new Solar Maximum in 2023-2026.
"We expect Solar Cycle 25 will be very similar to Cycle 24: another fairly weak maximum, preceded by a long, deep minimum," says panel co-chair Lisa Upton, a solar physicist with Space Systems Research Corp.
"Here," she says, "is a figure showing the last minimum and where we are with the current minimum."
"As you can see – we haven't quite reached the lowest levels of the last cycle – where we experienced several consecutive months with no sunspots. However, the panel expects that we should reach those levels [between now and the end of 2020]."