Solar Cycle 24 at Six Years: Over the Peaks and Through the Streams

Solar Cycle 24 has been a below-average sunspot cycle. There were peaks in the daily and monthly-averaged sunspot number in the Northern hemisphere in 2011 and in the Southern hemisphere in 2014. Now that sunspot activity appears to be on the decline, another part of the solar cycle becomes important. Energetic events from high-speed streams flowing from the Sun can produce crippling radiation storms in the magnetosphere. Predicting those events that will affect our assets in space requires a different kind of solar prediction and some idea of how the radiation will propagate through the solar system. With the rapid increase in solar data and capability of numerical models of the solar convection zone we are developing the ability to forecast the level of the next solar cycle. But no prediction based only on sunspot number will be usable for predicting the variation of the decline of a sunspot cycle. I will describe the status of Solar Cycle 24, our need for solar activity predictions at all phases of the solar cycle, and anticipate how those predictions could be made more accurate in the future.