14 DAY TRIAL // A collaboration of European researchers has demonstrated that the climate responds to periods of intense solar minimum on the scale of several centuries. Investigators also suspect that periods of less-intense solar activity also lead to different regional responses on the surface.
What this suggests is that the scientific community may need to take a differentiated approach to studying and understanding solar radiation. The event the scientists found to demonstrate the link occurred around 2,800 years ago.
The investigation was carried out by experts from the German Research Center for Geosciences GFZ, who worked together with colleagues in Sweden and the Netherlands. The team used the most modern methodological approach for the study.
In a series of new studies, investigators collected sediment samples from Lake Meerfelder Maar, which is located in Germany. Their purpose was to analyze potential annual variations in climate proxies and solar activity that may have left traces in the sediment record.
Nearly three millennia ago, a sustained reduction in solar activity was found to be directly correlated with a significant increase in humidity across Europe, alongside an abrupt decrease in average temperatures. Extreme windiness was also found to have occurred at that time.
Details of the investigation were published in this week's online issue of the top journal Nature Geoscience. The work shows that the strong solar minimum occurred during the pre-Roman Iron Age; the event is called the Homeric Minimum.
Basically, what the team discovered is that reduced solar activity can influence weather conditions across western Europe, primarily through a series of shifts it causes in regional atmospheric circulation patterns, EurekAlert reports.
“The change and strengthening of the tropospheric wind systems likely is related to stratospheric processes which in turn are affected by the ultraviolet radiation,” GFZ expert Achim Brauer explains.
“This complex chain of processes thus acts as a positive feedback mechanism that could explain why assumingly too small variations in solar activity have caused regional climate changes,” he adds.
Researchers now plan to extend their investigation to other locations, in order to determine whether the solar-climate relationship is causing different regional responses around the world.