Open Thread

There have been some great comments and links from contributors to their original research here in the last few days. Thank you all. I’m taking my fiancee away for the long bank holiday weekend to celebrate our engagement. Please continue to post your additional comments to existing threads, and get something interesting going on this [...]

Solar rotation speed and sunspot asymmetry

I am lucky to have such great contributions from my regular visitors. I’m trying to get te parameters right for my investigation of the relationship between planetary alignments and solar activity To help get a handle on changes in solar activity, visualisation of the data is all important. Tim C and M Vukcevic have come [...]

Breakthrough: major discovery on planetary – solar connection

People following this blog closely will know that Roy Martin’s excellent analysis of the tidal relationship of Jupiter, Earth and Venus alignments with the solar cycle has led me to test the possible electro-magnetic relationship using a modified copy of his original database, which he very kindly sent me earlier this week. The initial result [...]

When dynamologists disagree…

Also, fresh from the BBC: New research suggests that the longer-than-expected period of weak activity may have been linked to changes in the way a hot soup of charged particles called plasma circulated in the Sun. The study, conducted by Dr Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and her US [...]

Paul the Weatherman strikes again

My local TV weatherman Paul Hudson has stuck his neck out on his BBC blog again – Good Lad! You’ll get a mention in the ‘Hall of Fame‘ for this. Should the sun’s role in weather and climate be re-assessed? The idea that changes in solar activity can affect our weather and climate has very [...]

Roy Martin: New Planetary-Solar cyclicity hypothesis

Relations Between Solar Activity and Solar Tides Caused by the Planets Defined Roy Martin copyright 2009 Contact author for permission to republish. Summary The database established by Martin (1) is analysed. The database has monthly values for the alignment index representing the tidal influence of the planets Venus, Earth and Jupiter on the sun. The [...]

Roy Martin: amazing new Venus Earth Jupiter – Solar cycle analysis

This is really exciting. Roy Martin followed up on Ching Cheh Hung’s analysis of planetary alignments and their apparent relations with Solar cycles and improved the correlation in a big way. By building a new database of days on which alignments between the planets took place, and tweaking a few parameters, he has come up [...]

The message in the clouds

Tacking different datasets together is fraught with problems, so I’ve made sure the different datasets on this graph are clearly marked in different colours. Take note Phil Jones and Michael Mann… Update: I have replaced the graph with this better calibrated one. There is still an unresolved vertical shift of around 0.3%. I think the [...]

Interesting correlation: Sunspots vs Specific Humidity

I graphed specific humidity since 1940 against sunspot number averaged over the solar cycle, and got this surprising result: Since sunspot numbers don’t correlate so well as this with temperature, it raises the question of what it is which controls specific humidity in the atmosphere. How might the solar flux be affecting humidity? Wikipedia says [...]

Roy Spencer on Miskolczi greenhouse theory

I have been waiting for someone to properly critique Ferenc Miskolczi’s papers on the greenhouse effect. Who better than Dr Roy Spencer? I hope Ferenc Miskolczi will respond. Executive Summary Using both radiative transfer theory and radiosonde (weather balloon) observations to support his views, Miskolczi (2010) builds a case that the Earth’s total greenhouse effect [...]