Solar Influence on Global and Regional Climates

By M. Lockwood. Surveys in geophysics, 2012

168 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The literature relevant to how solar variability influences climate is vast—but much has been based on inadequate statistics and non-robust procedures. The common pitfalls are outlined in this review. The best estimates of the solar influence on the global mean air surface temperature show relatively small effects, compared with the response to anthropogenic changes (and broadly in line with their respective radiative forcings). However, the situation is more interesting when one looks at regional and season variations around the global means. In particular, recent research indicates that winters in Eurasia may have some dependence on the Sun, with more cold winters occurring when the solar activity is low. Advances in modelling “top-down” mechanisms, whereby stratospheric changes influence the underlying troposphere, offer promising explanations of the observed phenomena. In contrast, the suggested modulation of low-altitude clouds by galactic cosmic rays provides an increasingly inadequate explanation of observations.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/be95704f1608674b72a769b021a44e08340222be

How researchers see this paper

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In Atmospheric Science

1. I. Usoskin
2. G. Kovaltsov
3. F. Joos
4. R. Roth
5. N. Krivova
6. Ed Hawkins
7. S. Solanki
8. M. Lockwood

In Global and Planetary Change

1. I. Usoskin
2. F. Joos
3. R. Roth
4. N. Krivova
5. Ed Hawkins
6. S. Solanki
7. M. Lockwood

Citations in the corpus

• The Maunder minimum (1645–1715) was indeed a grand minimum: A reassessment of multiple datasets (2015, methodology): “We discussed consequences of the MM for the solar irradiance variability, which is a crucial point for the assessment of solar variability influence on both global and regional climate (Lockwood 2012; Solanki et al. 2013).”
• A reconstruction of radiocarbon production and total solar irradiance from the Holocene 14 C and CO 2 records: implications of data and model uncertainties (2013, background): “In the present study the Holocene evolution of cosmogenic radiocarbon (14C) production is reconstructed using a state of the art Earth system model of intermediate complexity and the IntCal09/SHCal04 radiocarbon records.”