Are cold winters in Europe associated with low solar activity?
By M. Lockwood, Richard Harrison, T. Woollings, S. Solanki. 2010
194 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Solar activity during the current sunspot minimum has fallen to levels unknown since the start of the 20th century. The Maunder minimum (about 1650–1700) was a prolonged episode of low solar activity which coincided with more severe winters in the United Kingdom and continental Europe. Motivated by recent relatively cold winters in the UK, we investigate the possible connection with solar activity. We identify regionally anomalous cold winters by detrending the Central England temperature (CET) record using reconstructions of the northern hemisphere mean temperature. We show that cold winter excursions from the hemispheric trend occur more commonly in the UK during low solar activity, consistent with the solar influence on the occurrence of persistent blocking events in the eastern Atlantic. We stress that this is a regional and seasonal effect relating to European winters and not a global effect. Average solar activity has declined rapidly since 1985 and cosmogenic isotopes suggest an 8% chance of a return to Maunder minimum conditions within the next 50 years (Lockwood 2010 Proc. R. Soc. A 466 303–29): the results presented here indicate that, despite hemispheric warming, the UK and Europe could experience more cold winters than during recent decades.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/697d85c0612a8056b46d274e9fb0ba5edca68b7a
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Atmospheric Science
In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Solar forcing of winter climate variability in the Northern Hemisphere (2011, background): “Given our modelling result, these cold winters were probably exacerbated by the recent prolonged and anomalously low solar minimu”
- A mechanism for lagged North Atlantic climate response to solar variability (2013, background): “…surface climate have been pointed out numerous times from both observations [Kodera and Kuroda, 2002; Woollings et al., 2000; Zhou and Tung, 2010; Lockwood et al., 2010; L. J. Gray, personal communication] and climate modelling studies [Shindell et al., 2001; Matthes et al., 2006; Haigh, 2001;…”
- Geomagnetic activity signatures in wintertime stratosphere wind, temperature, and wave response (2013, background): “Geomagnetic activity driven signatures have been found in various meteorological and climate records [e.g., Lu et al., 2008a; Seppälä et al., 2009; Lockwood et al., 2010], but it has remained unclear which mechanism or mechanisms would be responsible for communicating geomagnetic activity…”
- Solar Forcing for CMIP6 (v3.1) (2016, background): “More recently, it has become better established that there is a solar response in the Arctic Oscillation (AO) and NAO from the top-down mechanism (Shindell et al., 2001; Kodera, 2002; Matthes et al., 2006; Woollings et al., 2010; Lockwood et al., 2010; Ineson et al., 2011; Langematz et al., 2013; In”
- Recent variability of the solar spectral irradiance and its impact on climate modelling (2012, methodology): “expected out in 2013. Besides, degradation trends have also been analyzed by considering the expected invariance of SSI over the solar cycle minimum. The 490 latter method has been developed by Woods (2012) and applied to data during last solar cycle minimum (2008–2009) to estimate possible degradat”
- Solar Influence on Global and Regional Climates (2012, background): “This signal is largest in the tropics (Frame and Gray 2010; Lockwood et al. 2010b) and so gives a relative decrease in the pole-to-equator temperature gradient for lower solar activity.”