This won’t exactly be music to the ears of the climate alarmist tendency, which prefers to claim that people somehow dictate the course of climate variations.
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The Sun’s energy affects our climate but its influence is often ignored as changes in its intensity are very small. Its effect might be subtle but over decadal periods it adds up to being significant as a series of recent papers show, says Net Zero Watch.
Scientists from the University of California, Irvine, the National Taiwan Normal University, and the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, find that the 11-year solar cycle has a significant correlation with sea surface temperature variations in the North-eastern Pacific.
They believe that the Sun’s influence is first seen and then amplified in the lower stratosphere, but it then alters the circulation in the troposphere which then affects the temperature of the ocean.
They note that the changes have a structure similar to that of the Pacific meridional mode – an interaction between trade winds and ocean evaporation which is an important trigger of the central Pacific (CP) type of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO).
It seems that the 11-year solar cycle modulates the CP ENSO and, in particular, is associated with more CP El Niño events during the active phase of the cycle and more La Niña events when the solar cycle undergoes a downturn.
The solar influence is also apparent in other aspects of airflow in the tropics. A team from Oxford University, Aarhus University, the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany; Imperial College London, and the Grantham Institute, of Imperial College London, recently provided observational evidence that the solar cycle affects atmospheric circulation over the Pacific on decadal timescales finding that there is a reduction of east–west sea-level pressure gradients over the Indo-Pacific Ocean during solar maxima and the following few years.
This reduction is associated with westerly wind anomalies at the surface and throughout the equatorial troposphere in the western/central Pacific as well as an eastward shift of precipitation that brings more rainfall to the central Pacific. It’s an effect that shows up in some climate models that use simulations considering only solar irradiance variations.
A Missed Connection
Another recent study shows a correlation between the end of solar cycles and a switch from El Niño to La Niña conditions suggesting that solar variability can drive seasonal weather variability on Earth. If the connection outlined in the journal Earth and Space Science holds up, it could significantly improve the predictability of the largest El Niño and La Niña events.
According to Scott McIntosh, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and co-author of the paper: “The scientific community has been unclear on the role that solar variability plays in influencing weather and climate events here on Earth. This study shows there’s reason to believe it absolutely does and why the connection may have been missed in the past.”
The paper does not examine what physical connection between the Sun and Earth could be responsible for the correlation, but that there are several possibilities such as the influence of the Sun’s magnetic field on the incidence of cosmic rays that bombard Earth.
A team from the Australian National University, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and Australian Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes find a solar influence on the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) – an important pattern of climate variability in the extratropical Southern Hemisphere, with major regional climate impacts.
Full article here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
December 30, 2021
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