Jerilyn Billings thought she had been teleported from Wichita to the desert.
"It was like I was in Phoenix," she said in a Facebook post.
It was no wonder — the temperature as 1 a.m. neared on Thursday had climbed to 102.
Readings surged 17 degrees in 20 minutes — from 85 at 12:22 a.m. to 102 at 12:42 a.m.
It's almost certainly the first time the temperature has soared into triple digits after midnight in Wichita, weather officials said.
The spike was the result of a heat burst, which occurs when dry air plummets to the Earth's surface as a thunderstorm collapses, meteorologists said. As the air nears the ground, it heats dramatically.
"They are rare, but dramatic," WeatherData chief executive Mike Smith wrote of heat bursts in his weather blog Thursday.
Wind speeds of nearly 50 mph accompanied the heat burst in places.
Those winds may have been responsible for outages that knocked out power to nearly 3,000 Westar Energy customers early Thursday morning.
Power was knocked out to nearly 1,300 customers in and around Clearwater just before 12:30 a.m. Another 1,575 customers in downtown Wichita and east of downtown lost power at 12:54 a.m., Westar spokeswoman Gina Penzig said.
The Clearwater outage lasted for 26 minutes, Penzig said. Power was restored to most downtown Wichita customers at about 2 a.m., though areas near downtown were without power for another couple of hours.
"You have to have perfect conditions... in order to get these things," said Chance Hayes, warning coordination meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Wichita.
For starters, it has to be very dry.
Wichita recorded less than 2 1/2 inches of rain in May — nearly 2 inches below normal — and the 0.01 inch that fell midmorning Thursday was the first measurable precipitation this month.
Thursday morning's heat burst resulted from thunderstorms that collapsed in northwest Harper County, sending winds and intense heat surging northeast right into Wichita, Hayes said.
"As the storm is collapsing, there's a lot of compression of air," Hayes said.
Sun's Fading Spots Signal Big Drop in Solar Activity SPACE.com
Denise Chow, SPACE.com Staff Writer Space.com – Tue Jun 14, 5:00 pm ET
This story was updated at 3:54 p.m. EDT.
Some unusual solar readings, including fading sunspots and weakening magnetic activity near the poles, could be indications that our sun is preparing to be less active in the coming years.
The results of three separate studies seem to show that even as the current sunspot cycle swells toward the solar maximum, the sun could be heading into a more-dormant period, with activity during the next 11-year sunspot cycle greatly reduced or even eliminated.
The results of the new studies were announced today (June 14) at the annual meeting of the solar physics division of the American Astronomical Society, which is being held this week at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.
"The solar cycle may be going into a hiatus," Frank Hill, associate director of the National Solar Observatory's Solar Synoptic Network, said in a news briefing today (June 14).
The studies looked at a missing jet stream in the solar interior, fading sunspots on the sun's visible surface, and changes in the corona and near the poles. [Photos: Sunspots on Earth's Star]
"This is highly unusual and unexpected," Hill said. "But the fact that three completely different views of the sun point in the same direction is a powerful indicator that the sunspot cycle may be going into hibernation."
Spots on the sun
Sunspots are temporary patches on the surface of the sun that are caused by intense magnetic activity. .. http://www.space.com/11858-dark-sunspots-origins-explained.html .. These structures sometimes erupt into energetic solar storms that send streams of charged particles into space.
Since powerful charged particles from solar storms can occasionally wreak havoc on Earth's magnetic field by knocking out power grids or disrupting satellites in orbit, a calmer solar cycle could have its advantages.
Astronomers study mysterious sunspots because their number and frequency act as indicators of the sun's activity, which ebbs and flows in an 11-year cycle. Typically, a cycle takes roughly 5.5 years to move from a solar minimum, when there are few sunspots, to the solar maximum, during which sunspot activity is amplified.
Currently, the sun is in the midst of the period designated as Cycle 24 and is ramping up toward the cycle's period of maximum activity. However, the recent findings indicate that the activity in the next 11-year solar cycle, Cycle 25, could be greatly reduced. In fact, some scientists are questioning whether this drop in activity could lead to a second Maunder Minimum, which was a 70-year period from 1645 to 1715 when the sun showed virtually no sunspots. [Video: Rivers of Fire Inflame Sunspots]
Hill is the lead author of one of the studies that used data from the Global Oscillation Network Group to look at characteristics of the solar interior. (The group includes six observing stations around the world.) The astronomers examined an east-west zonal wind flow inside the sun, called torsional oscillation. The latitude of this jet stream matches the new sunspot formation in each cycle, and models successfully predicted the late onset of the current Cycle 24.
"We expected to see the start of the zonal flow for Cycle 25 by now, but we see no sign of it," Hill said. "The flow for Cycle 25 should have appeared in 2008 or 2009. This leads us to believe that the next cycle will be very much delayed, with a minimum longer than the one we just went through."
Hill estimated that the start of Cycle 25 could be delayed to 2021 or 2022 and will be very weak, if it even happens at all.
The sun's magnetic field
In the second study, researchers tracked a long-term weakening trend in the strength of sunspots, and predict that by the next solar cycle, magnetic fields erupting on the sun will be so weak that few, if any, sunspots will be formed.
With more than 13 years of sunspot data collected at the McMath-Pierce Telescope at Kitt Peak in Arizona, Matt Penn and William Livingston observed that the average magnetic field strength declined significantly during Cycle 23 and now into Cycle 24. Consequently, sunspot temperatures have risen, they observed.
If the trend continues, the sun's magnetic field strength will drop below a certain threshold and sunspots will largely disappear; the field no longer will be strong enough to overcome such convective forces on the solar surface.
In a separate study, Richard Altrock, manager of the Air Force's coronal research program at NSO's facility in New Mexico, examined the sun's corona and observed a slowdown of the magnetic activity's usual "rush to the poles."
"A key thing to understand is that those wonderful, delicate coronal features are actually powerful, robust magnetic structures rooted in the interior of the sun," Altrock said. "Changes we see in the corona reflect changes deep inside the sun."
Altrock sifted through 40 years of observations from NSO's 16-inch (40 centimeters) coronagraphic telescope.
New solar activity typically emerges at a latitude of about 70 degrees at the start of the solar cycle, then moves toward the equator. The new magnetic field simultaneously pushes remnants of the past cycle as far as 85 degrees toward the poles. The current cycle, however, is showing some different behavior.
"Cycle 24 started out late and slow and may not be strong enough to create a rush to the poles, indicating we'll see a very weak solar maximum in 2013, if at all," Altrock said. "If the rush to the poles fails to complete, this creates a tremendous dilemma for the theorists, as it would mean that Cycle 23's magnetic field will not completely disappear from the polar regions. … No one knows what the sun will do in that case."
If the models prove accurate and the trends continue, the implications could be far-reaching.
"If we are right, this could be the last solar maximum we'll see for a few decades," Hill said. "That would affect everything from space exploration to Earth's climate."
An image of the sunspot with the Earth shown to scale. The image has been colorized for aesthetic reasons. This image with 0.1 arcsecond resolution from the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope represents the limit of what is currently possible in terms of spatial resolution. CREDIT: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, V.M.J. Henriques (sunspot), NASA Apollo 17 (Earth)
By gazing at the edges of sunspots, astronomers now are pinpointing key details of how these mysterious dark marks form.
Sunspots are blotches on the sun that appear dark because they are cooler than the rest of the solar surface. Astronomers do know they are linked to intense magnetic activity on the sun, which can suppress the flow of hot matter, but much about their structure and behavior remains enigmatic.
The dark heart of a sunspot, called the umbra, is surrounded by a brighter edge known as the penumbra, which is made of numerous dark and light filaments more than 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) long. They are relatively thin, at approximately 90 miles (150 km) in width, making it difficult to resolve details that could reveal how they arise.
Now scientists have discovered these columns are rapid downflows and upflows of gas, matching recent theoretical models and computer simulations suggesting these filaments are generated by the movement of hot and cold gases known as convective flow. [Photos: Sunspots on Earth's Closest Star]
The researchers used the Swedish 1-meter Solar Telescope to focus on a sunspot on May 23, 2010. They found dark downflows of more than 2,200 miles per hour (3,600 kph) and bright upflows of more than 6,600 miles per hour (10,800 kph). The models suggest that columns of hot gas rise up from the interior of the sunspot, widen, cool and then sink downward while rapidly flowing outward.
Map of velocities in the sunspot as measured using the Doppler effect. Blue implies that the gas is moving towards us - this corresponds to an upward motion on the solar surface. Red implies that the gas is moving away from us - this corresponds to a downward motion on the solar surface. The net-like pattern surrounding the sunspot is solar granulation. The field of view corresponds to 24000 km on the sun.
CREDIT: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, G.B. Scharmer, V.M.J. Henriques, D. Kiselman, J. de la Cruz Rodriguez
"This is what we have been expecting to find, but we were maybe surprised about actually succeeding in seeing these flows," researcher Göran Scharmer, a solar physicist at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Stockholm University in Sweden, told SPACE.com.
In the future, the researchers hope to also measure the magnetic fields linked with these flows to learn more about how they cause such activity.
The scientists detailed their findings in a paper published online June 2 in the journal Science.
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