Scientists Issue Unprecedented Forecast of Next Sunspot Cycle March 6, 2006 The next sunspot cycle will be 30 to 50 percent stronger than the last one, and begin as much as a year late, according to a breakthrough forecast using a computer model of solar dynamics developed by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. The research results, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA, were published on-line on March 3 in the American Geophysical Union journal Geophysical Research Letters. Scientists now predict that the next cycle, known as Cycle 24, will produce...