Comparing Sunshine Hours and Max Annual Temperature in the UK.

Contributor ‘Green Sand’ on WUWT offers this useful page on the Met Office site: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/actualmonthly/ Where I grabbed a couple of graphs of annual sunshine hours and annual max temp for the UK:

Konrad: Empirical test of ocean cooling and back radiation theory

Some background – Willis Eschenbach had a guest posting over at WUWT in which he claimed that LWIR could heat Earth’s oceans. Myself and several others on the thread contended that this LWIR was likely to be stopped by the evaporative skin layer and would not slow the exit of heat from the oceans. Numerous [...]

Henrik Svensmark’s hypothesis, it’s the sun

This is a quick pointer to news about the CERN CLOUD experiment. Others have more time to do the topic justice. Thanks to Tenuc for pointing out the [above] from Nigel Calder’s blog… As some others are saying, don’t go assuming too much just yet. A good thread on WUWT containing many pointers to elsewhere. [...]

Delve into Hadcrut at the poles

A previous post was about UAH lower troposphere and polar temperatures, so it is logical to look at Hadcrut3 in the same way.

Emerging sunspots

A new paper (18th Aug) has been published in Science. “Detection of Emerging Sunspot Regions in the Solar Interior” — Stathis Ilonidis*, Junwei Zhao, Alexander Kosovichev from Stanford Abstract Much more information is in the Stanford press release

Polar temperature change during satellite era

  Figure 1 A minor fuss has errupted over ERA40 reanalysis data at Arctic latitudes so I thought it would be useful to post how I see some of the data. [EDIT: SERIOUS ERROR CORRECTED, untested software, mistake by me, had an incorrect weighted mean showing a grossly small temperature range] WUWT article This pair [...]

Solar cycle 24 is close to peak

Official version here as gif I have plotted scaled square root ssn with the Sheet data. This suggests solar cycle 24 is already approaching maximum, the Sheet data nearing 70 degrees tilt.

Brainteaser: Relationship between mass and orbital distance

Wikipedia says: Small body orbiting a central body In astrodynamics the orbital period  (in seconds) of a small body orbiting a central body in a circular or elliptic orbit is: where:  is length of orbit’s semi-major axis,  is the standard gravitational parameter,  is the gravitational constant,  the mass of the central body. Note that for all ellipses with a given semi-major axis the orbital [...]

Feedback loops in the solar system

When the Sun was young the ‘solar wind’ was much stronger than it is now. So strong that it added large amounts of matter to the proto-planets orbiting it. The loss of such substantial amounts of material from the Sun reduced it’s angular momentum, and increased that of the planets. This created a ‘spin-orbit coupling’ between [...]

Relativity on the rocks?: Mercury perihelion precession anomaly explained

From Wikipedia A number of effects in our solar system cause the perihelions of planets to precess (rotate) around the sun. The principle cause is the presence of other planets which perturb each other’s orbit. Another (much more minor) effect is solar oblateness. Mercury deviates from the precession predicted from these Newtonian effects. This anomalous rate [...]