Impact of solar activity on precipitation in the United States

Abstract

In this paper we analyze the relationship between the sunspot numbers and the average monthly precipitation measured at meteorological stations in the US. The results indicate that there is a significant correlation between the solar activity and the monthly average precipitation data for selected months and time delays. In order to confirm the relationship, for the precipitation data we check the forecasting abilities of a popular time series model with and without additional information on the sun activity. Namely, first we fit the autoregressive moving average (ARMA) time series model to the US precipitation data and calculate one-step ahead forecasts. Next, we repeat the same steps with the ARMA model with exogenous input (ARMAX) which is the sunspot number data. We show that the forecast errors are essentially lower for the ARMAX model for months and time delays found in the correlation analysis.