Coldest weather in 30 years marks the start of a series of extreme winters

[FarCenter]

After enduring the coldest winter for 30 years, you might have been hoping for some respite from the cold weather.

By Laura Roberts
Published: 9:00AM BST 15 Apr 2010

However, scientists are now warning that Britain can expect to endure a series of extreme winters - the like of which have not seen for more than 300 years.

Researchers have found that low solar activity - marked by a decrease in the sun's magnetic field - influences the weather conditions across northern Europe.

According to a study published today, we are moving into "an era of low solar activity which is likely to result in UK winter temperatures more like those at the end of the Seventeenth Century."

According to Mike Lockwood, one of the main researchers, the latest winter marks the start of a Maunder minimum - when solar activity falls for a prolonged time.

<SNIP>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7589931/Coldest-weather-in-30-years-marks-the-start-of-a-series-of-extreme-winters.html

Full text of paper is at http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/5/2/024001/fulltext

[hatrack]

1. Hmm . . strange, since there was the biggest CME in years just the other day . . .

The sun has just exploded to life, blasting a huge coronal mass ejection (CME) into space. This is the largest such event for several years.

In case you haven't noticed, our nearest star has been a little subdued of late, and trying to find even the smallest of sunspots (an indicator of solar activity) was becoming a lost cause. But not anymore! It would appear the sun is getting its act together, exhibiting an uptick in sunspot numbers, increased magnetic activity and more explosive events (flares and CMEs) as solar activity increases toward "solar maximum," predicted to reach its peak in 2013.

As noted in Nicole Gugliucci's article yesterday, we are slowly beginning to understand the root cause behind these magnetic explosions and how solar phenomena such as CMEs impact our planet. For an idea about the fireworks that are sparked when solar wind particles slam into our atmosphere, have a read of Irene Klotz's article "Earth Gets Geomagnetic Wallop."

Fortunately, we have the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) continuously keeping an the sun, and the groundbreaking solar observatory watched the eruption in all its glory.


EDIT

http://news.discovery.com/space/boom-the-sun-unleashes-a-huge-cme.html

[FarCenter]

2. For how long will the current grand maximum of solar activity persist?

Understanding the Sun's magnetic activity is important because of its impact on the Earth's environment. The sunspot record since 1610 shows irregular 11-year cycles of activity; they are modulated on longer timescales and were interrupted by the Maunder minimum in the 17th century. Future behavior cannot easily be predicted – even in the short-term. Recent activity has been abnormally high for at least 8 cycles: is this grand maximum likely to terminate soon or even to be followed by another (Maunder-like) grand minimum? To answer these questions we use, as a measure of the Sun's open magnetic field, a composite record of the solar modulation function Φ, reconstructed principally from the proxy record of cosmogenic 10Be abundances in the GRIP icecore from Greenland. This Φ record extends back for almost 10,000 years, showing many grand maxima and grand minima (defined as intervals when Φ is within the top or bottom 20% of a Gaussian distribution). We carry out a statistical analysis of this record and calculate the life expectancy of the current grand maximum. We find that it is only expected to last for a further 15–36 years, with the more reliable methods yielding shorter expectancies, and we therefore predict a decline in solar activity within the next two or three cycles. We are not able, however, to predict the level of the ensuing minimum.

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2008GL035442.shtml

[FarCenter]

3. Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years

Direct observations of sunspot numbers are available for the past
four centuries1,2, but longer time series are required, for example,
for the identification of a possible solar influence on climate and
for testing models of the solar dynamo. Here we report a
reconstruction of the sunspot number covering the past 11,400
years, based on dendrochronologically dated radiocarbon concentrations.
We combine physics-based models for each of the
processes connecting the radiocarbon concentration with sunspot
number. According to our reconstruction, the level of solar
activity during the past 70 years is exceptional, and the previous
period of equally high activity occurred more than 8,000 years
ago.We find that during the past 11,400 years the Sun spent only
of the order of 10% of the time at a similarly high level of
magnetic activity and almost all of the earlier high-activity
periods were shorter than the present episode. Although the
rarity of the current episode of high average sunspot numbers
may indicate that the Sun has contributed to the unusual climate
change during the twentieth century, we point out that solar
variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the
strong warming during the past three decades3.


http://mirage.mps.mpg.de/projects/solar-mhd/pubs/solanki/Solanki_et_all_2004_nature.pdf

[Quezacoatl]

4. Thanks Europe. We just had our warmest winter in recorded history