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Do changes in the Sun affect the Earth’s climate?
Variations in the Earth’s orbit clearly have a major effect on our climate over very long timescales, but what about the impact of intrinsic variability within the Sun over decades or centuries? This is one of the questions that Joanna Haigh, Professor of Atmospheric Physics at Imperial College London, will answer at the launch of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change’s Briefing Paper on ‘Solar influences on climate’.
In the past there was much interest in the phenomena of sunspots and their potential link to our weather but attempts at establishing a scientific link between the two largely failed. Over the past 30 years, however, satellite-borne radiometers have produced evidence that total solar irradiance varies in sync with sunspot numbers.
Combining this knowledge of the Sun with global meteorological databases is enabling scientists to understand solar influences on global and regional climate. Indeed we now know that the Sun is able to cause a greater impact in some geographical regions than others and that the main effects are not focused in the tropics, as would be expected, but are largely focused in the mid latitudes.
Professor Haigh’s research is contributing to a new understanding of climate variability through the use of atmospheric modelling and the examination of solar UV radiation absorption in the stratosphere and the mechanisms by which this impacts on the atmosphere beneath.
About the speaker
Professor Joanna Haigh studied at Oxford University (MA 1975, DPhil 1980) and Imperial College (MSc 1977) and joined Imperial as a lecturer in 1984; she was appointed Professor of Atmospheric Physics in 2001 and Head of the Department of Physics in 2009. She has published widely in the area of radiative transfer in the atmosphere, climate modelling, radiative forcing of climate change and the influence of solar irradiance variability on climate. She has been Vice-President of the Royal Meteorological Society, Editor of Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment and acted on many UK and international panels.
Currently she is the UK representative to the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences, Editor of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences and a Member of the Royal Society’s Climate Change Advisory Group. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and of the Royal Meteorological Society and in 2004 she received the Institute of Physics Charles Chree Medal and Prize for her work on solar influences on climate.
Solar Influences on Climate Briefing Paper
The Executive Summary of the Briefing Paper is available for download prior to the launch of the paper.