It is not the type that the weather bureau tips will bring more showers today and tomorrow - it is space weather, born beneath the sun's surface.

Scientists know the sun goes through an 11-year activity cycle.

At its peak, the sun frequently produces massive flares, belching deadly X-rays into space.

Gigantic explosions called coronal mass ejections spew out clouds of plasma far bigger than the Earth and blotchy sunspots dot the sun's face.

The flares and plasma clouds trigger interplanetary electromagnetic storms, causing auroras, disrupting long-distance communications and GPS navigation systems and even inducing electric currents in pipelines.

Such storms have caused power blackouts across Scandinavia and Canada.

The latest period of minimum solar activity should have ended "at least a year ago", the cosmic weatherman Phil Wilkinson said yesterday.

Why the sun has slumbered on has mystified scientists.

"We have had a drought of sunspots," said Dr Wilkinson, the assistant director of the Bureau of Meteorology's IPS radio and space services branch.

"This is the longest period the sun has been quiet since the start of the Space Age.

"Seeing the sun doing nothing is really exciting," he said, adding it made physicists wonder how little they really understood.

However, there is now evidence that all is well and that the sun is finally waking.

Dr Rachel Howe and Dr Frank Hill, of the US National Solar Observatory, using a global telescope network, including the Learmonth Solar Observatory at North West Cape, Western Australia, have found that sunspots increase when currents flowing from the sun's poles, up to 7000 kilometres beneath its surface, "reach a critical latitude of 22 degrees".

This time the currents have "moved sluggishly, taking three years to cover a 10-degree range in latitude compared to two years for the last solar cycle".

But they have "now reached the critical latitude … the sun's internal magnetic dynamo continues to operate, and heralds the beginning of a new cycle of solar activity".

Dr Wilkinson said: "We are just verging on starting to see [new] active regions on the sun."

He said the coming storms once more could treat the world to auroras and communication blackouts.