Abstract
Abstract. Beginning from the 1950's, Paluš and Novotná (2009) observed statistically significant phase coherence among oscillatory modes with the period of approximately 7–8 years detected in monthly time series of sunspot numbers, geomagnetic activity aa index, North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index and near-surface air temperature from several mid-latitude European stations. Focusing on geographical distribution of the phenomenon we study Northern Hemisphere patterns of phase coherence between solar/geomagnetic activity and NCEP/NCAR and ERA40 near-surface air temperature. Both the reanalysis datasets provide consistent patterns of areas with marked phase coupling between solar/geomagnetic activity and climate variability observed in continuous monthly data, independent of the season, however, confined to the temporal scale related to the oscillatory periods about 7–8 years.
Highlights
A renewed interest in the field of Sun–climate relations, namely in detecting and understanding of climate responses to variable solar activity has led to a number of recently published interesting results
The phase coherence in the plateau was quantified using mean phase coherence (MPC) and mutual information (Palus, 1997) and tested using Fourier transform-based surrogate data with the results strongly supporting the existence of phase synchronization/coherence on the significance levels about 99.5% (p < 0.005) (Palusand Novotna, 2009)
Palusand Novotna (2007, 2008) proved existence of common oscillatory modes in the solar/geomagnetic and climate data. They were able to apply the synchronization analysis in order to find a possible dependence between the phases of the observed oscillatory modes, and to find possible scale-specific relationships of the solar, geomagnetic and climate variability
Summary
A renewed interest in the field of Sun–climate relations, namely in detecting and understanding of climate responses to variable solar activity has led to a number of recently published interesting results (see Haigh, 2003, 2005, 2007; De Jager, 2005; Lean et al, 2005; Lockwood and Frohlich, 2007; Tinsley, 2008; Lockwood, 2009 and references therein). While there is a well-documented influence of the solar signal in the stratosphere, observations of the tropospheric responses to the solar variability are more ambiguous. In this study we are interested in tropospheric responses to variable solar activity, in particular, in measurable influences of the solar variability observed in near-surface air temperature. The strongest solar signal in the tropospheric temperature has been observed predominantly in middle latitudes (Haigh, 2003; Lu et al, 2007), eventually in the tropics and in the middle latitudes of both hemispheres (Gleisner and Thejll, 2003; Gleisner et al, 2005). Analogous latitudinal dependence – maximal response in the middle latitude near-surface air temperature was demonstrated by Lean and Rind (2008), while Camp and Tung (2007); Tung and Camp (2008) observed the strongest solar cycle response in higher latitudes
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