April 2020 could actually turn out to be a very significant month for us space weather watchers! The NOAA/NASA Solar Cycle prediction panel predicted back in December that solar minimum would likely occur in April of 2020! There is no guarantee that solar minimum will occur this month but it is very likely that we have passed solar minimum already or solar minimum has yet to come in the near future. There is a +/- 6-month margin of error when it comes to these predictions.

There is still a lot to learn when it comes to the inner workings of our Sun which makes it really hard if not impossible to predict solar activity and the development of the Solar Cycle in advance. We have to keep in mind that there are likely more months to come with no sunspot regions at all but high latitude sunspot regions belonging to Solar Cycle 25 will become more and more common as time goes by and the Solar Cycle 24 sunspot regions close to the equator will become more and more uncommon.

We do have to keep in mind that it will take at least 6 months after solar minimum to conclude when solar minimum occurred. This is because the solar minimum is decided by the Smoothed Sunspot Number (SSN).

Media Story - https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/news/view/406/20200331-april-the-month-of-solar-minimum