What do sunspots affect on earth

Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. So the true sunspot cycle is There is also a superimposed fluctuation with a period of 25 months, i. Sunspots were observed in the Far East for over years, but examined more intensely in Europe after the invention of telescopes in the 17th century.

In Johannes Hevelius in Danzig made drawings of the movements of sunspots eastwards and gradually towards the solar equator.

In William Herschel attempted to correlate the annual number of sunspots to the price of grain in London. The year cycle of the number of sunspots was first demonstrated by Heinrich Schwabe in There have been several periods during which sunspots were rare or absent, most notably the Maunder minimum , and less markedly the Dalton minimum Fig 2.

By means of the premise of excess 14 C concentrations in independently dated material such as tree rings , other minima have been found at times prior to direct sunspot observations, for instance the Sporer minimum from to Data from 8, year-old bristle-cone pine trees indicate 18 periods of sunspot minima in the last 7, years 1. This and other studies have shown that the Sun as well as other stars spends about a quarter of its time with very few sunspots. There is another well-known, super-imposed variation of annual sunspot numbers, of about 85 years.

This irregular variation affects the length of the sunspot cycle, ranging from 9. Maxima of sunspot-cycle length occured in , and Self-confident and combative, Abbot defended his findings against all objections, meanwhile telling the public that solar studies would bring wonderful improvements in weather prediction. Other scientists were quietly skeptical. Abbot's solar constant variations were at the edge of detectability if not beyond. About all he seemed to have shown for certain was that the solar constant did not vary by more than one percent, and it remained an open question whether it varied anywhere near that level.

Perhaps Abbot was detecting variations not in the solar constant, but in the transmission of radiation through the atmosphere. Despite widespread skepticism, the study of cycles was popular in the s and s. By now there were a lot of weather data to play with, and inevitably people found correlations between sunspot cycles and selected weather patterns. Respected scientists and over-enthusiastic amateurs announced correlations that they insisted were reliable enough to make predictions.

Sooner or later, every prediction failed. An example was a highly credible forecast that there would be a dry spell in Africa during the sunspot minimum of the early s. When that came out wrong, a meteorologist later recalled, "the subject of sunspots and weather relationships fell into disrepute, especially among British meteorologists who witnessed the discomfiture of some of their most respected superiors. As one of them recalled, "purported connections with By the s, most meteorologists and astronomers had abandoned the quest for solar cycles in the weather.

Yet some respected experts continued to suspect that a connection did exist, lurking somewhere in the data. Less prone to crank enthusiasm and scientific scorn, if equally speculative, was the possibility that the Sun could affect climate on much longer timescales.

During the s, a few people developed simple models that suggested that even a modest change in solar radiation might set off an ice age, by initiating self-sustaining changes in the polar ice.

A leading British meteorologist, Sir George Simpson, believed the sequence of ice ages showed that the Sun is a variable star, changing its brightness over a cycle some , years long. Such thinking was still in circulation in the s. The internal fluctuations he hypothesized had a hundred-million-year timescale that seemed to match the major glacial epochs. Manwhile,within a given glacial epoch "a kind of 'flickering' of solar radiation" in the Sun's outer shell would drive the expansion and retreat of ice sheets.

Weather Bureau expert put it, "the problem of predicting the future climate of Planet Earth would seem to depend on predicting the future energy output of the sun Some people continued to pursue the exasperating hints that minor variations in the sunspot cycle influenced present-day weather. Interest in the topic was revived in by H. Willett, who dug out apparent relationships between changes in the numbers of sunspots and long-term variations of wind patterns.

Sunspot variations, he declared, were "the only possible single factor of climatic control which might be made to account for all of these variations. Willett admitted that "the physical basis of any such relationship must be utterly complex, and is as yet not at all understood. Perhaps climate changes could be due to "solar variation in the ultraviolet of the sort which appears to accompany sunspot activity.

In the s and s, instruments on rockets that climbed above the atmosphere managed to measure the Sun's ultraviolet radiation for the first time. They found that the radiation did intensify during high sunspot years. However, ultraviolet light does not penetrate below the stratosphere. Meteorologists found it most unlikely that changes in the thin stratosphere could affect the layers below, which contain far more mass and energy. Still, the hypothesis of atmospheric influence remained alive, if far from healthy.

A few scientists speculated more broadly. Maybe weather patterns were affected by the electrically charged particles that the Sun sprayed out as "solar wind.

More indirectly, at times of high sunspot activity the solar wind pushes out a magnetic field that tends to shield the Earth from the cosmic rays that rain down from the universe beyond. When these rays penetrate the upper reaches of the atmosphere, they expend their energy producing sprays of charged particles. Therefore, more sunspots would mean fewer of these particles. Either way there might be an influence on the weather. Meteorologists gave these ideas some credence. If they did influence weather, it had to be through a subtle triggering mechanism that remained altogether mysterious.

Anyway variations connected with sunspots seemed likely to bear only on temporary weather anomalies lasting a week or so the timescale of variations in sunspot groups themselves , not on long-term climate change. People continued to report weather features that varied with the sunspot cycle of 11 years, or with the full solar magnetic cycle of 22 years the magnetic polarity of sunspots reverses from one year cycle to the next.

There were also matches to possible longer solar variation cycles. In the lead was a team under the Leningrad meteorologist Kirill Ya. Kondratyev, who sent balloons into the stratosphere to measure the solar constant.

This drew cautious notice from other scientists. But the authors admitted that the conclusion would remain in doubt unless it could be verified by spacecraft entirely above the atmosphere.

Another tentatively credible study came from a team led by the Danish glaciologist Willi Dansgaard. Inspecting layers of ancient ice in cores drilled from deep in the Greenland ice cap, they found cyclical variations. They supposed the Sun was responsible. For the cycle that they detected, about 80 years long, had already been reported by scientists who had analyzed small variations in the sunspot cycle. They began by matching their results with a global cooling trend that, as others reported, had been underway since around The group predicted the cooling would continue through the next one or two decades, followed by a warming trend for the following three decades or so.

The geochemist Wallace Broecker was impressed. He "made a large leap of faith" as he later put it and assumed that the cycles were not just found in Greenland, but had a global reach. His combined curve would bottom out in the s, then quickly head up. Greenhouse effect warming caused by human emissions of carbon dioxide gas CO 2 would come on top of this rise, making for a dangerously abrupt warming.

Later studies failed to find Dansgaard's cycles globally. If they existed at all, the cause did not seem to be the Sun, but quasi-cyclical shifts in the North Atlantic Ocean's surface warmth and winds. This was just another case of supposed global weather cycles that faded away as more data came in. It was also one of several cases where Broecker's scientific instincts were sounder than his evidence.

Whatever caused the downturn in temperature since the s, perhaps a combination of factors such as a surge of industrial pollutiion, it would eventually be overmatched by the steadily increasing greenhouse gases.

Indeed warming did resume in the s. By now it was clear that if you applied powerful statistical techniques to enough tree ring samples, you would sometimes turn up the year solar cycle.

Solar activity definitely had some kind of effect on climate in some places — but nothing obviously strong or consistent. For exaample, the s saw controversial claims that weather data and tree rings from various parts of the American West revealed a year cycle of droughts, presumably driven by the solar magnetic cycle. Coming at a time of severe droughts in the West and elsewhere, these claims caught some public attention.

That might help to explain at least some of the quasi-regular cycles that had been tentatively associated with sunspots. All this helped to guarantee that scientists would continue to scrutinize any way that solar activity might influence climate, but always with a skeptical eye.

If meteorologists had misgivings, most astronomers dismissed outright any thought of important solar variations on a timescale of hundreds or thousands of years. Surface features like sunspots might cycle over decades, but that was a weak, superficial, and short-term effect. As for the main energy flow, improved theories of the nuclear furnace deep within the Sun showed stability over many millions of years. Alongside this sound scientific reasoning there may have been a less rational component.

Evidence was accumulating that the Sun truly does change at least superficially from one century to another. Already in Minze Stuiver had moved in the right direction. Stuiver was concerned about peculiar variations in the amount of radioactive carbon found in ancient tree rings.

Carbon is generated when cosmic rays from the far reaches of the universe strike the atmosphere. Stuiver noted how changes in the magnetic field of the Sun would change the flux of cosmic rays reaching the Earth. They were not suggesting that changes in carbon or cosmic rays altered climate; rather, they were showing that the isotope could be used to measure solar activity in the distant past.

For the development of this important technique, a good example of laboratory work and its attendant controversies, see the supplementary essay on Uses of Radiocarbon Dating. In Suess tried correlating the new data with weather records, in the hope that carbon variations "may supply conclusive evidence regarding the causes for the great ice ages. This period of sunspot minima is called the Maunder Minimum. So how much does the solar output affect Earth's climate?

There is debate within the scientific community how much solar activity can, or does affect Earth's climate. There is research which shows evidence that Earth's climate is sensitive to very weak changes in the Sun's energy output over time frames of 10s and s of years.

Times of maximum sunspot activity are associated with a very slight increase in the energy output from the sun. Ultraviolet radiation increases dramatically during high sunspot activity, which can have a large effect on the Earth's atmosphere. The converse is true during minimum sunspot activity.

But trying to filter the influence of the Sun's energy output and its effect on our climate with the "noise" created by a complex interaction between our atmosphere, land and oceans can be difficult.

For example, there is research which shows that the Maunder Minimum not only occurred during a time with a decided lack of sunspot activity, but also coincided with a multi-decade episode of large volcanic eruptions. Large volcanic eruptions are known to hinder incoming solar radiation. Finally, there is also evidence that some of the major ice ages Earth has experienced were caused by Earth being deviated from its average Indeed Earth has tilted anywhere from near 22 degrees to But overall when examining Earth on a global scale, and over long periods of time, it is certain that the solar energy output does have an affect on Earth's climate.

However there will always be a question to the degree of affect due to terrestrial and oceanic interactions on Earth. Please Contact Us. Please try another search.