This offers renewed hope for Svensmark’s theory of cosmic ray modulation of earth’s cloud cover. Here is an interesting correlation published just yesterday in GRL.
Cosmic rays detected deep underground reveal secrets of the upper atmosphere
Watch the video animation here (MPEG video will play in your media player)
Published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters and led by scientists from the UK’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), this remarkable study shows how the number of high-energy cosmic-rays reaching a detector deep underground, closely matches temperature measurements in the upper atmosphere (known as the stratosphere). For the first time, scientists have shown how this relationship can be used to identify weather events that occur very suddenly in the stratosphere during the Northern Hemisphere winter. These events can have a significant effect on the severity of winters we experience, and also on the amount of ozone over the poles – being able to identify them and understand their frequency is crucial for informing our current climate and weather-forecasting models to improve predictions.
Working in collaboration with a major U.S.-led particle physics experiment called MINOS (managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory), the scientists analysed a four-year record of cosmic-ray data detected in a disused iron-mine in the U.S. state of Minnesota. What they observed was a strikingly close relationship between the cosmic-rays and stratospheric temperature – this they could understand: the cosmic-rays, known as muons are produced following the decay of other cosmic rays, known as mesons. Increasing the temperature of the atmosphere expands the atmosphere so that fewer mesons are destroyed on impact with air, leaving more to decay naturally to muons. Consequently, if temperature increases so does the number of muons detected.
What did surprise the scientists, however, were the intermittent and sudden increases observed in the levels of muons during the winter months. These jumps in the data occurred over just a few days. On investigation, they found these changes coincided with very sudden increases in the temperature of the stratosphere (by up to 40 oC in places!). Looking more closely at supporting meteorological data, they realised they were observing a major weather event, known as a Sudden Stratospheric Warming. On average, these occur every other year and are notoriously unpredictable. This study has shown, for the first time, that cosmic-ray data can be used effectively to identify these events.
Lead scientist for the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, Dr Scott Osprey said: “Up until now we have relied on weather balloons and satellite data to provide information about these major weather events. Now we can potentially use records of cosmic-ray data dating back 50 years to give us a pretty accurate idea of what was happening to the temperature in the stratosphere over this time. Looking forward, data being collected by other large underground detectors around the world, can also be used to study this phenomenon.”
Dr Giles Barr, co-author of the study from the University of Oxford added: “It’s fun sitting half a mile underground doing particle physics. It’s even better to know that from down there, we can also monitor a part of the atmosphere that is otherwise quite tricky to measure”.
Interestingly, the muon cosmic-ray dataset used in this study was collected as a by-product of the MINOS experiment, which is designed to investigate properties of neutrinos, but which also measures muons originating high up in the atmosphere, as background noise in the detector. Having access to these data has led to the production of a valuable dataset of benefit to climate researchers.
Professor Jenny Thomas, deputy spokesperson for MINOS from University College London said “The question we set out to answer at MINOS is to do with the basic properties of fundamental particles called neutrinos which is a crucial ingredient in our current model of the Universe, but as is often the way, by keeping an open mind about the data collected, the science team has been able to find another, unanticipated benefit that aids our understanding of weather and climate phenomena.”
Dr Osprey commented: “This study is a great example of what can be done through international partnerships and cross-disciplinary research. One can only guess what other secrets are waiting to be revealed.”
h/t to Ron de Haan
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George: in modern terminology the muon is not a meson. Mesons are quark-antiquark pairs, such as the pion. The muon is a lepton, like the electron and the tauon.
George E. Smith (11:21:51) :
Are you actively working in Particle Physics, Anna; or just schooled in it?
I retired in 2000 after 35 years in the field. Started with cosmic rays but ended with CERN experiments of course, bubble chambers and then a big LEP detector. I keep a bit my hand in, but not seriously.
planetary Ap continues to go lower…
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/Ap.gif
Anthony-not on topic. But I thought you would find it funny you are now beating Al Gore’s “We can solve it” without spending $300M!
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2009/01/absolutely-stunning-failure-of-al-gore.html
As Realitycheck correctly noted:
“It is generally accepted that the Artic Oscillation and/or North Atlantic Oscillation tend to shift negative up to 10 to 20 days following these SSW events – i.e. in meteorological terms SSWs tend to lead to high-latitude “blocking” – patterns which tend to generate intense cold surface high pressure systems near the poles and displace them southwards into the mid-latitudes. i.e. they typically lead to strong cold outbreaks into the mid-latitudes.This is interesting since we appear to be undergoing a significant SSW as we write…
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/temperature ”
We use this is forecasting weather weeks in advance in winter for our energy and ag clients. Models are usually slow on reflecting its building down. Take a close look at that plot. You will see we have far exceeded the max temp for this level in the post 1979 period, a significant mid winter warming event indeed.
A muon which penetrates through 500 m of solid rock, has to have a pretty high energy. Much, much higher than the cosmic rays which are screened by magnetic fields in solar active times and do not make it to the earth. So the cosmic particle, which by collision with a stratospheric air molecule generates this muon, has to have had an even higher energy.
I got the press release on Wednesday, but do not have seen the paper yet. I am quite sceptical of their claims.
Anna V:
I’m struggeling to understand the partical physics involved in your explanation (the last time I had anything to do with partical decay was high school 24 years ago).
So, if the underground detectores are incapable of seeing mesons resulting from cosmic rays interacting with the atmosphere, what the heck are they seeing that gives a 100% correlation?
des332: Here’s a good comment on the BBC Panorama / Obama speech story:
http://www.stinkyjournalism.org/editordetail.php?preview=1&id=251#comment
This is an important paper, but not for what has been speculated about here. The cosmic rays are not warming the stratosphere. The paper shows that one can measure the temperature in the stratosphere quite nicely using cosmic rays. Said temperature varies for other reasons. One of the things this method may allow is to get a fix on stratospheric temperatures back in the 1930s and that would be important. The paper has no bearing on Svensmark’s ideas, pro or con.
JamesG (10:59:05)
I’m not sure what you mean by “correlation issues”! But no I don’t think Svensmarks “basic theory” is demonstrated to be valid. Does variation of the CRF have a significant effect on climate? There’s no particular evidence for that notion is there? If we’re interested in the very large warming of the the last 30-odd years it can’t have a significant contribution from changes in the CRF since any changes in the CRF have been in the wrong direction as Svensmark and Friis-Christensen show in the web site you linked to. So we reject that hypothesis, at least for contemporary warming.
Well yes…there’s very little empirical evidence in support of a significant CRF contribution to the Earth’s energy budget, and a massive amount of empirical evidence in support of a major contribution from atmospheric CO2 concentrations. That’s obvious isn’t it?
Really? The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report assesses the climate sensitivity to be in the range 2 – 4.5 oC. The data that informs the conclusion of a climate sensitivity in that range is pretty much entirely empirical.
JamesG (11:19:53)
But according to the website you linked to the “correlation” isn’t clear in any data sets. It only becomes “clear” if one removes all the warming of the last 50 years (see Figure 2 of the web site you linked to:
: http://meteo.lcd.lu/globalwarming/Svensmark/Reply_to%20Lockwood_et_al_2007.pdf )
I’m not really sure what you’re arguing over. You chose to bring this web page to our attention, and yet you don’t seem to want to address the data that’s presented there. The web site data says nothing at all about the CRF. S-FC show that there is only a match between the solar cycle and the tropospheric temperature once all the warming has been removed by linear detrending. That’s what Figure 2 (bottom) shows doesn’t it? So the CRF is irrelevant (it perhaps makes a slight cooling effect) for the warming of the last 30-odd years.
Gary Gulrud, Leif Svalgaard
A query. If the following consideration applies to mesons why does it not also apply to ultraviolet radiation?
“Increasing the temperature of the atmosphere expands the atmosphere so that fewer mesons are destroyed on impact with air, leaving more to decay naturally to muons. Consequently, if temperature increases so does the number of muons detected.”
If the solar wind directly heats the atmosphere one should see an increase in the intensity of ionising/heating radiation at lower altitudes. This should affect the temperature of the air according to its ozone content.
Although the Svensmark idea is promising and is yet to be affirmed or rebutted I don’t think the above article helps either way.
I tend to agree with those who suggest that the changes in the air come first and the muon signal is a response ( though the matter of causation is still speculative).
We currently have a cooling ocean and a quiet sun. The observed changes seem to normally be winter phenomena.
Perhaps they are cooling phenomena generally.
The sun is not putting as much energy onto the oceans. The oceans are releasing less energy to the air. The air is cooling.
Anything we currently observe is more likely to be an air circulation response to overall cooling of the air above us than anything else. If that also produces a muon signal then so be it.
In my speculative opinion we are observing the natural changes that inevitably occur when the air is attempting to balance the global energy budget in the face of a reduction in energy input from both sun and ocean.
Werner Weber (12:44:20)
The data is quite convincing to me. A very close correlation indeed between the stratospheric temperature and the muon count rate (the latter varies between around 39,000 and 45,000 counts per day depending on temperature which the count rate follows very closely).
The minimum energy required for a muon to reach the MINOS detector 705 metres underground in 0.70 TeV (700 GeV), according to the authors. Depending on how big the detector is, that corresponds to around 3% (per square metre) of the total muon flux at the Earth’s surface that are detected. In other words if the MINOS detector is 1 sq metre then it detects around 3% of the surface flux. If it’s 10 square metre it detects only 0.3%. That’s a bit of a rough and ready calculation but I think it’s in the right ball park…..but it gives an idea of the proportion of muons that penetrate deeply. Of course if the detection efficiency is low then the number would have to be adjusted accordingly…
There’s a nice little comment piece by Giles Barr and Scott Osprey here (not a stable link but should work for a day or two).
This discussion has generated a lot more heat than light (Al Gore would not approve), but I think the most important aspect of this article is the quote from Professor Jenny Thomas, “… by keeping an open mind about the data collected, the science team has been able to find another, unanticipated benefit that aids our understanding of weather and climate phenomena.” That shows that there are still real scientists out there who don’t cook the books, don’t use preconceived notions and actually practice non-political science! The actual significance of the work will require more time for study and the application of more learned views, so much of the discussion to this point is premature – but interesting anyway.
@Leif Svalgaard (13:26:36) :
You wrote in part: “… One of the things this method may allow is to get a fix on stratospheric temperatures back in the 1930s and that would be important.”
The article said they only had data going back 50 years. Is there another source of data that would extend the record back another 20 years? (That sort of info is in your bailiwick.) If so, I agree that it would be cool.
Phew, if I’ve learned one thing from the comments on this article it’s that I won’t be taking Lubos Motl seriously for a while to come.
Leif,
Any chance that the events causing the SSW are related to the large transfers of energy from the solar magnetic field to the earth that was documented last year? I am assuming that to get a SSW, you need a huge source of energy somewhere, and the only logical source that I see is the sun. It should be pretty easy to rule out momentary TSI changes or flares/CMEs as the cause, which leaves some invisible but potent connection as the likely cause I would assume? Has there been any good work done on the causes of SSWs?
HR asks
Given that the muon was only discovered in 1936 there are limits to how far back any data could go.
Foinavon
“Does variation of the CRF have a significant effect on climate? There’s no particular evidence for that notion is there?”
–There is merely a very strong correlation and a theory. What do we have for CO2?: A very weak correlation and a theory. I remain skeptical of both because both are short on real data.
“If we’re interested in the very large warming of the the last 30-odd years it can’t have a significant contribution from changes in the CRF since any changes in the CRF have been in the wrong direction as Svensmark and Friis-Christensen show in the web site you linked to”
–Svensmark uses cosmic rays as a solar proxy. Even Lockwood said that just 20 years out of 110 didn’t match for the sun-climate connection. Svensmark showed even those 20 years aren’t far away when you use less-tainted temperature data – and they show 3 separate dataset correlations. In contrast CO2 doesn’t show any correlation whatsoever to any temperature dataset. So clearly strong correlation isn’t that important to you AGW believers in the first place. I see a trend upwards in figure 1 – where do you see a trend downwards? Figure 2 is detrended. They postulate a positive feedback from water vapor for the higher rise – hey why not; handwaving explanations are common enough in the AGW camp. Tit for tat I say. They could have used the fewer-aerosols handwave too, which is also in vogue with some climate scientists.
“massive amount of empirical evidence in support of a major contribution from atmospheric CO2 concentrations. That’s obvious isn’t it?”
–This is something that people repeat endlessly but have you actually looked for this evidence? It’s just not there! What we have instead is a collection of opinions that directly follow from the initial assumption that all warming in the past must have been from CO2. If it wasn’t then the entire argument falls down. This kind of confirmation bias is what seems to be called “evidence” in climate science.
“The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report assesses the climate sensitivity to be in the range 2 – 4.5 oC. The data that informs the conclusion of a climate sensitivity in that range is pretty much entirely empirical.”
–Even in these IPCC reports they admit that most of that sensitivity is from assumed positive feedback, which is up to 3 times the directly calculated CO2 effect. Did you miss that part? Such feedback is postulated and inferred but not yet actually observed. The data used to determine the climate sensitivities in these sensitivity calculations – and there aren’t that many – doesn’t in any way support the conclusions: It is all biased opinion. You can actually postulate negligible CO2 sensitivity – all you have to do is assume natural variation is dominant and hey presto.
“But according to the website you linked to the “correlation” isn’t clear in any data sets. It only becomes “clear” if one removes all the warming of the last 50 years”
–You need to clean your spectacles. The correlation is outstanding in 3 separate datasets and now – to cap it all – there is yet another apparent correlation in this independent work. Detrending to find a correlation is, btw, a very common procedure.
“The web site data says nothing at all about the CRF”
The paper is entirely about cosmic rays. They only talk about the solar cycle by using cosmic rays as a proxy.
I think: This thermometer is the most expensive in the world;
…
The figure below (Figure 3 of the article) shows the beautiful correlation between the temperature (5-day running average in blue) as measured by sounding balloons, and the muon rate in MINOS (also 5-day running average, red band with uncertainties). The alignment of the two curves is obviously not known a priori. The exact numerical calibration between muon counts (red, right scale) and temperature (blue, left scale) is a fitted output of the analysis, not an input.
http://www.instructables.com/community/Observing_quotweatherquot_stratospheric_temp/
Tex (14:45:48)
The authors of the study under discussion discuss the origin of the SSW in some detail. They’re due to Rossby waves. These (I’m paraphrasing/quoting the authors) propagate up from the troposphere to the stratosphere during winter. In analogy to water waves these can break causing temperatures in the polar stratosphere to rise by over 50K in a few days. The Rossby waves form particularly over major land masses as air moving over steep terrain is “pushed up” . Since most land mass is in the Northern hemisphere, Rossby Waves occur almost exclusively in the N. hemisphere. The frequency of Rossby Waves are thought to be tied loosly to wind direction in the tropical stratosphere and sea surface temperature…
(paraphrasing/quoting from Osprey et al. (2009) Sudden stratospheric warmings seen in MINOS deep underground muon data. Geophys. Res. Lett. in the press.)
It’s not the SSW event itself that would be a marker for Svensmark. It’s the fact that an SSW causes a “hole” in the stratosphere through which more cosmic ray particles can penetrate to the troposphere, collide, and affect low-level cloud formation that should be investigated.
JamesG (15:00:59)
You’re not addressing the Svensmark and Friis-Christensen (S-FC) web site article you brought to our attention scientifically, and it’s questionable whether you have any plans to do so! But I’ll have one more go, focussing exclusively on the S-FC web site which we can both look at and discuss dispassionately…the rest of your post is unsupported (and incorrect largely) assertion and not really relevant to the subject of the thread:
here’s the link to the S-FC web-site article:
http://meteo.lcd.lu/globalwarming/Svensmark/Reply_to%20Lockwood_et_al_2007.pdf
1. S-FC compare CRF data and tropospheric temperature (from radiosondes). They show essentially the same data in Figure 1 and in Figure 2 (top). These data are rather poorly correlated. We know this because S-FC give us the correlation coefficient (-0.31) [I assume you’ve noticed that the CRF data has been “turned upside down”]. In addition while S-FC smooth the CRF data in Figure 1 which makes it appear as if there is a goodish match, the data is much less smoothed in |Figure 2 (top) and we can see that the temperature rises starting near 1967, 1977, 1987 precede the “rises” (which are actually drops!) in the CRF. In other words there’s (i) little correlation between the CRF and the tropospheric temperature, and (ii) what correlation there is doesn’t indicate causality.
Are we agreed with that? f not why not?
2. In Figure 2 (bottom) S-FC remove the warming in the tropospheric temperature evolution by linear detrending, and extracting El Nino, volcanic etc. contributions by unspecified means. (they call this “removal of confusions”!.) They don’t give us any indications at all about how they do this, other than that the linear trend removed is 0.14 K (almost 0.7 K of warming).
Are we still agreed so far?
3. This denuded temperature profile shows a minor cooling trend over the last 50 years (not surprising if one removes all the warming) and it is this that S-FC plot with the CRF. Now the correlation is somewhat bettter (-0.47). That’s all very nice. But that analysis indicates that there has been no CRF contribution to warming during the last 50 years. The CRF trend is mildly cooling over this period (we knew this anyway of course [***]), and there is only a CRF-temperature match once all of the late 20th century and contemporary warming is removed.
Agreed? Or not?
We can conclude:
4. Variations in the CRF have made (according to S-FC) no contribution to the warming of interest.
We can also conclude:
5. We can’t say anything about the CRF anyway other than that we’ve measured it. The CRF cycles in antiphase with the other solar parameters [***] so that any parameter that is part of the solar cycle will generate essentially the same profile. Any changes we see in the tropospheric temperature are just as likely (in fact rather more likely) to be due to the cyclic variation in the solar irradiance.
Can we conclude anything constructive?
Yes, two things I would say, taking S-FC at face value:
(a.) The CRF (and solar output variation) has made no significant contribution to late 20th century and contemporary warming. If anything the contribution has been a slight cooling contribution ([Figure 2 (bottom)]
(b) It seems to be possible to “tease out” the solar cycle contribution to tropospheric warming through deconvolution of the temperature evolution tor emove greenhouse gas warming and other “confusions” (!). Of course if we were going to assess this properly we’d like to know how S-FC did their “removal of confusions”….
[***] http://ulysses.sr.unh.edu/NeutronMonitor/Misc/neutron2.html
Bill Marsh (05:40:29) :
According to some work I’ve read the level of GCR changes over geologic timescales based on the solar systems orbit of the Galaxy and its location in the plane of the Galaxy, but those changes occur over millions of years, not a few decades or a few years.
Per Nir J. Shaviv at:
http://www.sciencebits.com/ice-ages
(with very nice graphics!)
it is about 135 +/- 25 Million Years per galactic arm ‘crossing’ when GCR ought to ‘go high’ and we get an ice epoch. (We’ve “just left” an arm which argues for our leaving behind the ice epoch we’re in “Real Soon Now” in geologic terms… a couple of million years?)
I remembered the up/down galaxy midline period as about 52k yrs but wiki says it’s 33kyrs. At any rate, much of the 2012 Maya ballyhoo is about that being the time we cross the mid-line and GCR / dust / whatever rise happens. I try not to point out to those folks that we’re already about 32,997/33,000 ths of the way there and ought to have 32,997/33,000 ths of the effect, if any, already…
Then there is the dispute over wether this is true at all. It’s a visual alignment, but from the wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012
There are also claims like from Michael Tsarion [15] that an actual physical alignment of our entire solar system will occur with the horizontal plane of the Milky Way Galaxy on that day. The solar system is moving around the center of the galaxy every 225 million years or so, and while doing so is moving up and down in a cycle crossing the plane every 33 million years. According to the Journal Nature, this isn’t so because there is evidence of the solar system crossing the galactic plane 3 million years ago. This would mean that we are moving away from the galactic plane not toward it, and we won’t be due to cross it for another 30 million years.[16]
So I’m not worried… and I think these time scales are way outside of what we normally think of as weather, 30 year weather, 30 year ‘climate’, etc. But they do qualify for geologic time scale climate.