Category Weather & Climate

          Some Scientists believe that sunspot activity may have an effect on the Earth’s weather. Sunspots seem to occur in cycles of 11 years. Research has shown that major periods of drought have occurred roughly every 22 years, or two sunspot cycles. We have yet to discover the exact relationship between the two.

          A new study in the journal Science by a team of international of researchers led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research have found that the sunspot cycle has a big effect on the earth’s weather. The puzzle has been how fluctuations in the sun’s energy of about 0.1 percent over the course of the 11-year sunspot cycle could affect the weather? The press release describing the new study explains:

          The team first confirmed a theory that the slight increase in solar energy during the peak production of sunspots is absorbed by stratospheric ozone. The energy warms the air in the stratosphere over the tropics, where sunlight is most intense, while also stimulating the production of additional ozone there that absorbs even more solar energy. Since the stratosphere warms unevenly, with the most pronounced warming occurring at lower latitudes, stratospheric winds are altered and, through a chain of interconnected processes, end up strengthening tropical precipitation.

          At the same time, the increased sunlight at solar maximum causes a slight warming of ocean surface waters across the subtropical Pacific, where Sun-blocking clouds are normally scarce. That small amount of extra heat leads to more evaporation, producing additional water vapor. In turn, the moisture is carried by trade winds to the normally rainy areas of the western tropical Pacific, fueling heavier rains and reinforcing the effects of the stratospheric mechanism.

          The top-down influence of the stratosphere and the bottom-up influence of the ocean work together to intensify this loop and strengthen the trade winds. As more sunshine hits drier areas, these changes reinforce each other, leading to less clouds in the subtropics, allowing even more sunlight to reach the surface, and producing a positive feedback loop that further magnifies the climate response.

          These stratospheric and ocean responses during solar maximum keep the equatorial eastern Pacific even cooler and drier than usual, producing conditions similar to a La Nina event. However, the cooling of about 1-2 degrees Fahrenheit is focused farther east than in a typical La Nina, is only about half as strong, and is associated with different wind patterns in the stratosphere.

Picture Credit : Google

 

          Light from the Sun is made up of several different colours, each of which has its own wavelength. The wavelength of the blue part of the Sun’s light is shorter than the size of an oxygen atom. When the blue light waves hit the oxygen atoms in the Earth’s atmosphere, they are scattered, making the sky appear blue. The light waves of other colours (with greater wavelengths than blue) are also affected, but blue waves are scattered more than most.

          To understand why the sky is blue, we need to consider the nature of sunlight and how it interacts with the gas molecules that make up our atmosphere. Sunlight, which appears white to the human eye, is a mixture of all the colors of the rainbow. For many purposes, sunlight can be thought of as an electromagnetic wave that causes the charged particles (electrons and protons) inside air molecules to oscillate up and down as the sunlight passes through the atmosphere. When this happens, the oscillating charges produce electromagnetic radiation at the same frequency as the incoming sunlight, but spread over all different directions. This redirecting of incoming sunlight by air molecules is called scattering.

          The blue component of the spectrum of visible light has shorter wavelengths and higher frequencies than the red component. Thus, as sunlight of all colors passes through air, the blue part causes charged particles to oscillate faster than does the red part. The faster the oscillation, the more scattered light is produced, so blue is scattered more strongly than red. For particles such as air molecules that are much smaller than the wavelengths of visible light the difference is dramatic. The acceleration of the charged particles is proportional to the square of the frequency, and the intensity of scattered light is proportional to the square of this acceleration. Scattered light intensity is therefore proportional to the fourth power of frequency. The result is that blue light is scattered into other directions almost 10 times as efficiently as red light.

          When we look at an arbitrary point in the sky, away from the sun, we see only the light that was redirected by the atmosphere into our line of sight. Because that occurs much more often for blue light than for red, the sky appears blue. Violet light is actually scattered even a bit more strongly than blue. More of the sunlight entering the atmosphere is blue than violet, however, and our eyes are somewhat more sensitive to blue light than to violet light, so the sky appears blue.