Termination of Solar Cycles and Correlated Tropospheric Variability

Abstract

The Sun provides the energy required to sustain life on Earth and drive our planet's atmospheric circulation. However, establishing a solid physical connection between solar and tropospheric variability has posed a considerable challenge. The canon of solar variability is derived from the 400 years of observations that demonstrates the waxing and waning number of sunspots over an 11(‐ish) year period. Recent research has demonstrated the significance of the underlying 22 years magnetic polarity cycle in establishing the shorter sunspot cycle. Integral to the manifestation of the latter is the spatiotemporal overlapping and migration of oppositely polarized magnetic bands. We demonstrate the impact of “terminators”—the end of Hale magnetic cycles—on the Sun's radiative output and particulate shielding of our atmosphere through the rapid global reconfiguration of solar magnetism. Using direct observation and proxies of solar activity going back some six decades we can, with high statistical significance, demonstrate a correlation between the occurrence of terminators and the largest swings of Earth's oceanic indices: the transition from El Niño to La Niña states of the central Pacific. This empirical relationship is a potential source of increased predictive skill for the understanding of El Niño climate variations, a high‐stakes societal imperative given that El Niño impacts lives, property, and economic activity around the globe. A forecast of the Sun's global behavior places the next solar cycle termination in mid‐2020; should a major oceanic swing follow, then the challenge becomes: when does correlation become causation and how does the process work?

Airborne magnetic nanoparticles may contribute to COVID-19 outbreak: Relationships in Greece and Iran

“…It is interesting to note that the idea that the Sun influences the weather has been discussed time and again for over a century ( Meldrum, 1873 ). Likely, the solar cycle modulates the solar wind and affects, also, the rainfall and seasonal temperature patterns through alteration of atmospheric circulation on decadal timescales ( Leamon et al, 2021 ), and, therefore, also the dust modulation. Indeed, a recent paper has linked the increasing levels of PM 2.5 to the worst drought that has hit Taiwan in more than a half-century ( Chen et al, 2021 ).…”

Deciphering Solar Magnetic Activity. The Solar Cycle Clock

“…Independent of the actual mechanism of "quenching" the presence of four (two, of opposite polarity, in each hemisphere) bands on the disk leads to high-energy flaring activity falling off a cliff. Leamon, McIntosh, and Marsh (2018) demonstrated that there was a significant surge in EUV spectral irradiance across the cycle 23 terminator, on a timescale of less than a solar rotation, and possibly as little as a week. Their results from SDO/EVE, considering the irradiances of the various AIA EUV lines, is reproduced as the left-hand panel of Figure 6.…”

“…Figure 3 shows the role of the pre-terminator in bracketing the higher moments more clearly. The top two panels show the same dipole and quadrupole moment data as Figure 2, but expressed in a "Modified Superposed Epoch" analysis (Chree, 1913;Leamon, McIntosh, and Marsh, 2018). Rather than defining a standard superposed epoch analysis repeating over some number of days/years, the critical modification is to first scale time to be fractions of a cycle, from terminator to terminator.…”

Timing Terminators: Forecasting Sunspot Cycle 25 Onset

“…Figure 1 illustrates the evolution of EUV BPs from 1996, at the minimum between sunspot cycles 22 and 23, to the present at the minimum between sunspot cycles 24 and 25 in context with the sunspot number, their latitudinal (Leamon, McIntosh, and Marsh, 2018).…”

“…The dashed vertical lines indicate the terminators (McIntosh et al, 2019) of cycles 22 (August 1997) and 23 (February 2011). Extrapolating the fit for cycle 24 implies a termination date of April 2020 (±1 month), and extrapolating cycle 25 predicts October 2031 ±10 months(Leamon, McIntosh, and Marsh, 2018).…”