  We report on a comparison between space weather events that occurred around
the two peaks in the sunspot number (SSN) during solar cycle 24. The two SSN
peaks occurred in the years 2012 and 2014. Even though SSN was larger during
the second peak, we find that there were more space weather events during the
first peak. The space weather events we considered are large solar energetic
particle (SEP) events and major geomagnetic storms associated with coronal mass
ejections (CMEs). We also considered interplanetary type II radio bursts, which
are indicative of energetic CMEs driving shocks. When we compared the CME
properties between the two SSN peaks, we find that more energetic CMEs occurred
during the 2012 peak. In particular, we find that CMEs accompanying IP type II
bursts had an average speed of 1543 km/s during the 2012 peak compared to 1201
km/s during the 2014 peak. This result is consistent with the reduction in the
average speed of the general population of CMEs during the second peak. All SEP
events were associated with the interplanetary type II bursts, which are better
than halo CMEs as indicators of space weather. The comparison between the two
peaks also revealed that the discordant behavior between the CME rate and SSN
was more pronounced during the second peak. None of the 14 disk-center halo
CMEs was associated with a major storm in 2014. The lone major storm in 2014
was due to the intensification of the (southward) magnetic field in the
associated magnetic cloud by a shock that caught up and propagated into the
magnetic cloud.
