Jos´e M. Vaquero1 and Ricardo M. Trigo2
1 Introduction
Since ancient times, the Sun has been recognized as the main source of light and heat for our planet. Therefore, it is not surprising that we can find numerous examples in history of people who were conscious that changes in the Sun had necessarily a major impact on the Earth and, in particular, on its climate. In this chapter, we provide a brief introduction to this topic, identifying the major steps over the centuries, including the fundamental ideas and basic concepts of the Sun-Earth relationship.
Making such a synthesis is not a simple task as there are many remarkable facts, innovative ideas and characters of interest. We opted to focus on the key dates that have changed the paradigm of the Sun’s influence on terrestrial cli-mate. Based on those major milestones, four distinct eras are distinguished here (Figure1) that help to better understand the development of these ideas.
The first stage encompasses the initial ideas about the influence of the Sun on the Earth. However, these early speculations were later further investigated by the telescopic discovery of sunspots in 1610. Starting from this date, a new era of ideas and events unfolded, namely by considering the darker regions of the solarphotosphereas essential observational elements. The culmination of the process initiated by telescopic observers ofsunspotswas the discovery by Schwabe of thesolar cyclein 1844 (Schwabe,1844). Since then the idea of finding the same periodicities in the Sun’s variability and Earth’s climate become attractive to a wide community of scientists, in particular to find the 11-year periodicity insolar radiation measurements from the Earth surface. However, despite the numerous efforts undertaken in the next century, it was found impracticable to make out
1 Departamento de F´ısica, Centro Universitario de M´erida, Universidad de Extremadura, Avda. Santa Teresa de Jornet 38, 06800 M´erida, Badajoz, Spain
2Instituto Dom Luiz – Faculdade de Ciˆencias, Universidade de Lisboa, Campo Grande, Edf.
C8, 1749-016 Lisboa, Portugal
c
EDP Sciences 2015 DOI: 10.1051/978-2-7598-1733-7.c104
Fig. 1.Main historical milestones and corresponding eras that proved the way in our understanding of the role of the Sun on the terrestrial climatic system.
any solar periodicity based on measurements ofsolar radiationfrom the surface of the Earth. This incapacity led to the start of the fourth stage of this brief history, which was largely based on two distinct post-war technological revolutions: first the robust and precise measurements of solar irradiance from satellite platforms, and also the access to modern super-computers that allowed to probe and analyze the solar signal through sophisticated numerical models of climate.
2 Early intuitions and beliefs
As in so many other areas of science, if one is looking for the first theories it is appropriate to go back to the first centuries BC when classical Greek culture flour-ished. These early observers were watching sunrise and sunset to firmly establish the calendar. Although there are no clear evidence of naked-eye sunspot obser-vations in Greek classical texts, we can infer that naked-eye sunspot obserobser-vations were probably connected with changes in the weather. For example, the surviv-ing fragments of “De Signis Tempestatum” (On weather signs) by Theophrastus (371–287 BC), contain rather explicit references tosunspots in three fragments.
This work by Theophrastus consists of several chapters describing signs of different weather meteors. In particular, one of the sentences indicates the following: “if the Sun has a black mark when it rises, or if it rises out of clouds it is a sign of rain” (Vaquero and V´azquez, 2009).
J. M. Vaquero and R. M. Trigo: The role of the sun in climate change 29
This ability to report occasional examples of naked-eye observations of sunspotsis not restricted to the Greek context, as it can be found in other ancient cultures. For example, a description of an naked-eye observation of a sunspot as-sociated with heavy rainfall in the following days appears in the Arabic historical source “Al-Muqtabis-V”: “At the end of this year, a strange and unknown prodigy occurred in the solar disc, being covered by a patent spot, visible by eye, situation that continued seven complete days (October 14–20, AD 939). At the end of the week that spot in the Sun disappeared because of a copious rain fallen down during the night [. . . ]”.
The Greek belief in weather harbingers persisted in the Western culture for centuries. Thus, the first books printed in Europe on weather forecasts contain
“harbingers of the Sun” to make weather predictions. The book “Chronology or repertoire of times” (Sevilla, 1548) by Jer´onimo de Chaves contains many examples of these prediction rules that were abundantly replicated in the popular astrological literature for centuries.
3 Sunspot and the first crude Sun-Earth studies
The first telescopic observations of sunspots were made by Galileo and others in 1610 and contributed to the scientific revolution of the 17th century. The detailed observations of dark areas at the Sun’s surface, its alterations and rapid evolutions provide the first scientific evidence of the structural changes that occur often in our star. Hoyt and Schatten(1997) have shown that early on, some of these ob-servers tried to associate the occurrence or absence of sunspots with weather or climate events. For instance, in his book “The eye of Enoch and Elijah” (1645), Rheita proposed thatsunspotswere the cause of a cold June in Colonia (Germany) in 1642. Likewise, in his book “New Almagest” (1651), Riccioli stated that low temperatures are associated, according to his observations, with the presence of moresunspots. It is still possible to find many other examples in the 18thcentury.
Thus, after the deepsolar minimumof 1784, the Mexican astronomer Alzate won-dered: “Would the seasonal alterations experienced in Europe, and here, depend partly on that cause? Only experience will tell”.
However, the most outstanding work on the relationship between the Sun and Earth weather was published at the beginning of the 19th century by Sir William Herschel. In 1801 he wrote two papers in the “Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London” (Figure2) in which he noted that the absence ofsunspots coincided with severe weather seasons. Due to the lack of long-term meteorolog-ical series in that epoch, he used records of the price of wheat in England as a proxy for meteorological information. Herschel hypothesized an anticorrelation between the sunspot number and the market price of wheat. Dozens of works have revisited and updated Herschel’s results along the years. However, modern studies have shown that we should treat this hypothesis by Herschel with some skepticism.
Fig. 2.First page from famous article by Herschel (1801), investigating the relationship betweensunspots and price of crops (Courtesy Historical Archive of Sunspot Observa-tions).
4 Laying the foundations; solar cycle and irradiance measurements The next key event in this brief chronology took place in 1844. During this year, H. Schwabe, an amateur German astronomer, published in the “Astronomische Nachrichten” a brief note announcing the discovery of a 11-year cycle in thesolar activity. This discovery had a low impact in the astronomical community at that time, but with hindsight, we know that this discovery was the trigger for two revo-lutionary developments in the study of solar-terrestrial physics over the subsequent decades. The first one was that development by R. Wolf of the Sunspot Number series (Clette et al.,2014). Thus, for the first time, a long and standardized time
J. M. Vaquero and R. M. Trigo: The role of the sun in climate change 31
series was now available for the scientific community for systematic comparisons with meteorological records. The second advance resulted from the new evidence also found in the 19th century for a similar cycle in geomagnetic observations.
Moreover, the first observation of a solar flare on September 2, 1859 by Carring-ton and Hodgson (independently) and the related largegeomagnetic stormwas the confirmation of the close relationship between the Sun and the Earth’s magnetic field (Vaquero and V´azquez,2009).
Thus, a period began with studies of the relationship between the Sun and climate being dominated by the search for common cycles (or extreme events) in both the Sun and climate systems. In this context, scientists needed to measure the variations of the solar brightness to associate it with thesunspot number. In many observatories around the Earth, systematic observations ofsolar radiationbegan.
However, the first measurements with actinometers revealed the huge difficulty of separating the contribution due to the Sun from the contribution due to other local factors. This difficulty led to the development of increasingly precise (and complex) instruments, such as the pyrheliometer. Since the energy per unit area received at the Earth did not seem to vary with time, this amount was named solar constant (1361 W m−2).
Among the various attempts to improve the solar constant, we should high-light the long-term effort led by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Solar Constant Program (Hoyt, 1979). This program derived the solar constant from 1902 to 1962 using measurements from many locations on the Earth’s surface, such as Mt. Montezuma (Chile), Mt. Wilson (USA) and Bassour (Algeria). Although data from Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory show a positive correlation be-tween solar constant and the sunspot number, it is not statistically significant.
This low correlation indicates the extreme difficulty of detecting a solar signal at ground level due to atmospheric absorption and scattering. This led to the conclu-sion that the solar constant should be measured at very high altitudes, above the atmosphere, i.e with dedicated satellite platforms. In this regard, the Smithsonian program was not a complete failure, as it allowed to establish the required level of accuracy and reproducibility that space instruments should reach for measuring accurately the solar irradiance.
During the first half of the 20thcentury, some pioneering studies on the influ-ence of the Sun on biological systems were initiated. In particular, we would like to emphasize the ground-breaking work of A. Chizhevsky (Kornblueh,1965). The search for common cycles betweensunspot number (or other indices ofsolar ac-tivity) and meteorological parameters continues even nowadays. During this third stage, other long-term cycles (or quasi-cycles) were found in the series of solar activity indices, particularly the Gleissberg cycle (about 88 years) and the Vries or Suess cycle (approximately 210 years). More relevant within the context of this book, the 11-year cycle was found to be related to various terrestrial phenomena, such as the classic examples of tropical cyclones and the levels of Lake Victoria (Hoyt and Schatten,1997).
In the 1870s, C. Meldrum and A. Poey pioneered the idea of a solar connection with tropical cyclones in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, respectively. Later, in
the 1920s, a strong association between the levels of Lake Victoria (Africa) and the sunspot number was reported (Figure 3). This strong positive correlation spanned the period from 1896 to 1922. However, around 1927, it weakened and reversed sign, prompting the publication of several papers investigating the causes of these discontinuities in the relationship. Recent works, relying on more complex analyses, show that maxima of the 11-year sunspot cycle were matched by Victoria level maxima during the 20th century. This association is due to the occurrence of positive rainfall anomalies roughly one year before solar maxima (Stager et al., 2007).
Fig. 3.A comparison between the Sunspot number (red line) and Lake Victoria level (blue line).
5 Birth of Sun-Earth science: space data and computer simulations Our last key date is 1977, the year when J. Eddy confirmed that a period in the 17thcentury virtually withoutsunspotsoccurred, the so-calledMaunder minimum (c. 1645–1715). The association of this episode of grandsolar minimumwith the most intense phase of the Little Ice Age fueled the idea of a clear relationship be-tweensolar activityand Earth’s climate (Soon and Yaskell,2003). Retrospectively, historians and natural scientists have established the links between a number of historical documents that recorded the coldest years of the little ice age with the Maunder minimum, including paintings of the frozen river Thames in London or the numerous canals in Holland (Figure 4). Finally, systematic measurements of the solar constant (irradiance) from space also started around 1978. This new
J. M. Vaquero and R. M. Trigo: The role of the sun in climate change 33
space technology allowed the in-situ measurements of thesolar wind(density, com-position, magnetic field), improving the physical models of the heliosphere that shed new lights on the mechanisms of Sun-Earth relations.
Fig. 4.Ice on the River of Thames (London) during the memorable frost of 1683. (Cour-tesy Historical Archive of Sunspot Observations).
Of course, in recent decades, an increasing number of studies have found other statistically significant correlations between solar variability and various changes in the climate system. In 1980s, K. Labitzke and co-workers suggested that an influence of solar activity on temperatures in the stratosphere (approximately 10–50 km) appears when the winters are grouped according to the phase of the quasi-biennial oscillation, an approximately 2-year oscillation of easterly and westerly zonal winds in the equatorial lower stratosphere (Labitzke and van Loon, 1988). In 1990s, E. Friis-Christensen and K. Lassen reported a correlation between Northern Hemisphere land air temperature and the solar cycle length (Friis-Christensen and Lassen, 1991). Although other authors had previously proposed similar relationships, this work had a widespread impact on the scientific community, which strongly criticized these results. More recently,
in the 2000s, N. Marsh and H. Svensmark presented a strong positive correlation between the low cloud amount and the galactic cosmic rays over the period 1983–2005, triggering tens of papers on this matter during the last decade (Marsh and Svensmark, 2000). However, these last years in the history of the ideas of the solar-terrestrial relationships were also characterised by the use of modern technology to improve our understanding of the problem.
Total solar irradiance (TSI)has been measured consecutively and accurately from space over the past 35-40 years. It shows a clearsolar cyclevariation of about 0.1%, positively correlated with sunspot numbers. TSI values show similarities during the last three solar cycles (labeled 21, 22 and 23), but also important differences as the extremely low TSI value during the most recent solar cycle minimum. TSI values during solar cycle minima also show a long-term change correlating with the open magnetic field of the Sun (Fr¨ohlich,2013).
The increase in computing power over recent decades has also been crucial for the formulation and testing of fresh ideas about the influence of solar variability on the Earth. We now have access to numerical climate models that allow performing thousands of computational experiments. So, we can better understand and test the mechanisms of solar forcing on climate. In addition, we have much better access to large weather datasets, both real observations and model simulations, allowing studies that were previously impossible. Moreover, a great effort have been made in the collection of parameter related with themiddleand higheratmosphere, in-cluding stratospheric soundings, chemistry of the mesosphere-thermosphere, total electron content, FoF2 index, etc. Thus, scientists have proposed a number of different solar forcing mechanisms, nevertheless a hot debate has surrounded this topic and a consensus view is still lacking (Gray et al.,2010). As a final remark, it is worth mentioning that in recent decades, astronomy and climatology have been characterised (as most other branches of science) by an increasing speed in the rate of new results and publications. In this perspective, we are quite sure that the next big milestone in the fascinating quest for the elusive Sun-climate link is likely to occur sooner than we might currently expect.
Further reading
Benestad, R.E.: 2006,Solar activity and Earth’s Climate, 2nd edition, Springer.
Hoyt, D.V. and Schatten, K.H.: 1997,The role of the sun inclimate change, New York, Oxford University Press.
Soon, W.-H. and Yaskell, S.H.: 2003, The Maunder Minimum and the Variable Sun-Earth Connection, Singapore, World Scientific.
Vaquero, J.M. and V´azquez, M.: 2009,The Sun Recorded Through History, Berlin, Springer.