Solar Cycle 24: is the peak coming?

Abstract

Solar cycle activity forecasting, mainly its magnitude and timing, is an essential issue for numerous scientific and technological applications: in fact, during an active solar period, many strong eruptions occur on the Sun with increasing frequency, such as flares, coronal mass ejections, high velocity solar wind photons and particles, which can severely affect the Earth's ionosphere and the geomagnetic field, with impacts on the low atmosphere. Thus it is very important to develop reliable solar cycle prediction methods for the incoming solar activity. The current solar cycle 24 appeared unusual from many points of view: an unusually extended minimum period, and a global low activity compared to those of the previous three or four cycles. Currently, there are many different evidences that the peak in the northern hemisphere already occurred at 2011.6 but not yet in the southern hemisphere. In this brief note we update the peak prediction and its timing, based on the most recent observations.