Dalton Minimum Returns

Scientists Link Quite Sun & Cold Winters

Doug L. Hoffman at The Resilient Earth

Asking the somewhat obvious question, “are cold winters in Europe associated with low solar activity?” a group of scientists have announced that the answer is yes. While this may seem unsurprising, the finding is another indication that Earth's climate is not simply driven by greenhouse gas emissions. Even so, some scientists are only grudgingly accepting the finding, cautioning that this only applies in the central UK and refusing to admit that the Sun could affect global mean temperatures as well. Still, the researchers found that average solar activity has declined rapidly since 1985 and cosmogenic isotopes suggest a possible return to Maunder minimum conditions within the next 50 years. This could be a sign that climate science is starting to recover from its CO2 fixation.

Writing in Environmental Research Letters, Mike Lockwood et al. have verified that solar activity does seem to have a direct correlation with Earth's climate—at least in the central UK. The reason that the scope of the study is limited to that area, or at most Europe, is that it is one of the few regions that there is a reliable, continuous temperature record going back to the Little Ice Age.

My emphasis added.  Read the whole post here.

Solar Cycle Prediction (Updated 2010/04/01)

Click on image for larger version.

Predicting the behavior of a sunspot cycle is fairly reliable once the cycle is well underway (about 3 years after the minimum in sunspot number occurs [see Hathaway, Wilson, and Reichmann Solar Physics; 151, 177 (1994)]). Prior to that time the predictions are less reliable but nonetheless equally as important. Planning for satellite orbits and space missions often require knowledge of solar activity levels years in advance.

Full details here.

Russian scientist suggests colder times ahead.

Anthony Watts has the details at Watts Up With That

MOSCOW, April 23 (UPI) — A Russian scientist says the Arctic may be getting colder, not warmer, which would hamper the international race to discover new mineral fields.

An Arctic cold snap that began in 1998 could last for years, freezing the northern marine passage and making it impassable without icebreaking ships, said Oleg Pokrovsky of the Voeikov Main Geophysical Observatory.

“I think the development of the shelf will face large problems,” Pokrovsky said Thursday at a seminar on research in the Polar regions.

Scientists who believe the climate is warming may have been misled by data from U.S. meteorological stations located in urban areas, where dense microclimates creates higher temperatures, RIA Novosti quoted Pokrovsky as saying. “Politicians who placed their bets on global warming may lose the pot,” Pokrovsky said.

The sun has been quiet now for 8 days for a total of 15 spotless days since the beginning of the year.  Details at www.spaceweather.com.

Solar Dynamics Observatory first light images to be released today

Anthony Watts Writes this morning here

SDO First-Light Briefing
Launched on Feb. 11, 2010, SDO is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun and its dynamic behavior. The spacecraft will provide images with clarity ten times better than high definition television and more comprehensive science data faster than any solar observing spacecraft in history.

Artist concept of SDO spacecraft.Credit: NASA/Goddard

NASA will hold a news briefing and unveil initial images from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, at 2:15 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, April 21, in the atrium of the Newseum in Washington, D.C. The Newseum is located at 555 Pennsylvania Ave., NW. NASA Television and the agency’s Web site will provide live coverage of the briefing.

[Note: Insiders tell me that some of the images from the spacecraft show exquisite details of material streaming outward and away from sunspots. Other SDO photos show extreme magnifications of activity on the sun’s surface, such as pores. The spacecraft also has made some high resolution measurements of solar flares in a broad range of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths. The images are stunning I'm told. I'll post them here as soon as they are available. - Anthony]

Low solar activity link to cold UK winters

Mark Kinver the BBC News Science and Environment reporter has this story on more cold weather in the UK and Continental Europe due to low solar activity. 

They identified a link between fewer sunspots and atmospheric conditions that "block" warm, westerly winds reaching Europe during winter months.
But they added that the phenomenon only affected a limited region and would not alter the overall global warming trend.

The findings appear in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
"By recent standards, we have just had what could be called a very cold winter and I wanted to see if this was just another coincidence or statistically robust," said lead author Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics at the University of Reading, UK.

To examine whether there was a link, Professor Lockwood and his co-authors compared past levels of solar activity with the Central England Temperature (CET) record, which is the world's longest continuous instrumental record of such data.

The researchers used the 351-year CET record because it provided data that went back to the beginning of the Maunder Minimum, a prolonged period of very low activity on the Sun that lasted about half a century.

The Maunder Minimum occurred in the latter half of the 17th Century - a period when Europe experienced a series of harsh winters, which has been dubbed by some as the Little Ice Age. Following this, there was a gradual increase in solar activity that lasted 300 years.

Read the rest of the story here.

Now with the Iceland volcano eruptions this week, UK and Continental Europe could be even colder than the Maunder Minimum, especially if the volcano continues to erupt for 2 years like it did in the 1800s Stay tuned.

Maunder or Dalton?

Joseph D’Aleo has written a paper on current climate trends.

Warming after a cold winter will disappear quickly as it did in 2007

The pop in global temperatures, even the satellite, the last few months seems surprising to some in the Northern Hemisphere where the winter was hard. In Russia, it may have been the coldest on record, while across northern China, Europe and the southern and central United States, it was the coldest since the late 1970s or even the early 1960s. It was not unexpected. We showed the following upper level anomaly pattern was likely for the winter given the low solar, El Nino and developing east Quasi-Biennial Oscillation or QBO (shown in research by our own Climate Prediction Center to modulate solar and El Nino Southern Oscillation or ENSO).

The paper is here. At the end of the paper D’Aleo suggests that there may be a Maunder or Dalton in our future.

Plethora of Sun Data

Russ Steele

I have discovered and very interesting web site with a plethora of climate data, including  a large number or graphic presentations on the Sun. Here is a link to Climate4You’s Sun Page. 

I found this reconstruction of solar irradiance since 1610 by Lean et al (1995) and Lean (2000) most interesting. From 1900 on it almost looks like our current warming? (click for a larger image)

How did the Sun affect the climate when life evolved on the Earth?

C. Karoff, H. Svensmark

Abstract:

Using kappa Ceti as a proxy for the young Sun we show that not only was the young Sun much more effective in protecting the Earth environment from galactic cosmic rays than the present day Sun; it also had flare and corona mass ejection rates up to three orders of magnitude larger than the present day Sun. The reduction in the galactic cosmic ray influx caused by the young Sun's enhanced shielding capability has been suggested as a solution to what is known as the faint young Sun paradox, i.e. the fact that the luminosity of the young Sun was only around 75% of its present value when life started to evolve on our planet around four billion years ago. This suggestion relies on the hypothesis that the changing solar activity results in a changing influx of galactic cosmic rays to the Earth, which results in a changing low-altitude cloud coverage and thus a changing climate. Here we show how the larger corona mass ejection rates of the young Sun would have had an effect on the climate with a magnitude similar to the enhanced shielding capability of the young Sun.

H/T from heliogenic climate change