Natural climatic oscillations driven by solar activity

Abstract

Many climatic parameters (ground and ocean surface temperatures, pressure, atmospheric precipitation, etc.) have temporal variations with characteristic periods from several to several tens of years or more. The unknown cause of these oscillations, together with the similarity of some of them to known solar cycles, has stimulated attempts to relate these two phenomena. The basic arguments against the existence of such a relationship are that variations in climatic parameters do not always occur synchronously with the corresponding 11- and 22-year solar cycles: the phase shift between climatic and solar variations is inconstant and changes with time from 0° to 180°. In addition, the energy of terrestrial manifestations of solar activity seems insufficient to stimulate the considered weather-climatic processes, at least within the limits of the linear approach. In the present work, it is shown that in some cases, these contradictions can be removed for variations with a period more than 11 years under the assumption that climatic variations are forced oscillations driven by an external force (for example, a force related to solar activity), that implies the existence of intrinsic (natural) climatic oscillations. The result serves as an additional argument in favor of the reality of a sun-climate connection and probably points to its probable nonlinear mechanism. © 2011 Pleiades Publishing, Ltd.