Thursday, August 5, 2010

Cosmic ray fluctuations DO affect clouds

Supporting in real life Svensmark's experimentally supported theory. It's difficult reading for non-specialists but below is the journal abstract. A Forbush decrease is a decrease in cosmic rays reaching earth due to eruptions from the sun. A Kolmogorov Smirnoff one sample runs test is a simple statistical test used in many disciplines that shows how unusual a sequence of similar events is. I have paragraphed the abstract to make it a bit easier to follow

Since cloud cover is known even to Warmists as an influence on temperatures, this provides an explanation of HOW the sun affects climate. We've known for a couple of hundred years that there was a correlation between solar activity and climate changes but in the absence of a connecting mechanism, Warmists have been able to dismiss the correlation as happenstance. Changes in gross solar output are tiny percentagewise so that alone could not be the explanation

A correlation study of high-altitude and midaltitude clouds and galactic cosmic rays by MIPAS-Envisat

By Susanne Rohs et al.

The cloud index (CI), the cloud occurrence frequency (Occ), and the extinction data (Ext) of the Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding instrument on board Envisat (MIPAS-E) from July 2002 to March 2004 are used to investigate a possible link between galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) and midaltitude and high-altitude clouds (CI, Occ: 9–18 km, Ext: 12–24 km).

The zonally averaged data with 3 km vertical resolution are averaged over six major Forbush decrease (FD) events and subsequently correlated with the Climax neutron monitor data (CNM). In order to allow for nucleation and growth of ice particles, time lags from 0 to 5 days are applied.

We find several weak but statistically significant correlations with an excess of positive cloud-GCR correlations. Introducing a time lag does not enhance the correlations significantly.

Subdividing the data in a global grid with 30° × 90° × 3 km resolution shows higher correlations in some regions. The investigation of the individual FD events yields a heterogeneous picture.

Overall, there is a weak tendency toward a positive cloud-CNM correlation. A Kolmogorov-Smirnov test shows that for time shifts from 0 to +5 days a weak GCR-cloud effect is evident in the MIPAS-E measurements.

An estimation of the impact of this effect delivers that a 15% increase in CNM would result in a small decrease in CI (corresponding to an increase in cloud opacity) which is most pronounced at 9 km altitude (−9% to +0.5%). For log(Ext) a decrease of −5 to 0% is calculated at 12 km altitude which shifts toward weak positive values at higher altitudes.

JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 115, D14212, 19 PP., 2010. The implications are spelled out a bit more fully here

From http://antigreen.blogspot.com/

Posted via email from Garth's posterous

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