Guest post by David Archibald
Colder is drier.
The figure above is after a figure from Maus et al 2010 “Long term solar activity influences on South American rivers”. It shows a very good correlation between solar activity, as measured by sunspot number, and the flow rate of the Parana River, the second largest river in South America. The Parana River now hosts the Itaipu Dam with installed capacity of 14,000 MW.
A recent paper in an engineering journal shows a similar strong solar control on the level of Lake Victoria in East Africa (Mason March 2010): 
As Mason notes, an interesting correlation was noticed in the early 1900s between lake level and solar activity, in the form of the sunspot number. The interest this caused waned when the correlation seemed to disappear after about 1928. The early 1960s saw a dramatic climate anomaly in East Africa. Lake levels rose significantly, including those of Lake Victoria, and flows in the Tana River in Kenya doubled. The sluice gates at the Owen Falls dam were opened to release the additional water required by the Nile waters agreement and they stayed open, almost continuously, until well into the 1990s. This surplus water also led Uganda to invest in a new hydroelectric power station at Kiira. But the lake level starting falling from 1964 with an oscillation around the falling trend. This oscillation, controlled by solar activity, is shown in the following figure from Mason:
The falling trend in the level of Lake Victoria meant that the new hydro dam at Kiira did not produce any long term, additional energy for Uganda.
Back to South America and the Itaipu Dam – it produces 90% of the electric power consumed by Paraguay and 19% of Brazil’s consumption. As Maus et al note, the relationship between smaller solar activity and low Parana’s discharge can also be found in historical records.
For example, low discharges were reported during the period known as the Little Ice Age (LIA). In particular, a traveller of that period recalls in his diary that in the year 1752 the streamflow was so small that the river could not even be navigated by the ships of that time, which were less than 5 ft draft, to be compared with ships up to 18 ft draft that can navigate it at present as far north as Asuncion in Paraguay.
Our prediction for Solar Cycle 24 in terms of F10.7 flux is shown following:
Given the link between East African and central South American rainfall and solar activity, the list of economic impacts from the current solar minimum (Solar Cycles 24 and 25) can be expanded to:
- Canadian agricultural will get a severe whacking from a shortened growing season and un-seasonal frosts.
- 24 year drought in central South America
- 24 year drought in East Africa
- Paraguay and Brazil having severe power shortages.
This list is by no means exhaustive. The last time the world witnessed mass starvation was the 1965-67 drought in India which killed 1.5 million people. Things don’t look pretty.
References:
Mauas, P.J..D., A.P.Buccino and E.Flamenco, 2010, Long-term solar activity influences on South American rivers, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics on Space Climate, March 2010.
Mason, P.J., 2010, Climate variability in civil infrastructure planning, Civil Engineering 163, pages 74-80.
David Archibald
July 2010
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It makes no difference, an ice age will be upon us by Spring anyway 🙂
http://geraldcelentechannel.blogspot.com/2010/07/emergency-report-dr-gianluigi-zangari.html
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
I live here/there and I tremble if DA predicts anything as he is usually correct. So far though rainfall has been way above average and temps way below average. LOL
The Parana River correlation is impressive, to say the least.
I notice the work by Mason is from 2010. Was there any indication noted by him that flow on the Parana was decreasing again?
Oops. Both works are from 2010. Sorry ’bout that.
I imagine the reverse would be true for basin and range with no direct outflow to the oceans. As things cooled off, and evaporation rates eased, a return of subsoil moisture and then standing playa lakes would occur. Nevada used to be the land of many lakes until about 6000 years ago. I read a paper a few years ago saying that much of Nevada would return to a more moist regime if irrigation were stopped as inflows were now exceeding evaporation…
Now we wait for someone to want to see the first graph using F10.7 flux rather than sunspots…
I see sun spot numbers in Africa are different to sun spot numbers in South America.
Correlation with cloud cover and rainfall?
Dr. Svensmark anyone?
Any killer marmots connected with this work?
Max
I mean, the sun does not affect climate at all.
Why should it rivers?
I don’t mean this in the usual humorous way, but if true it really is worse than we thought.
I wonder now how well this correlates to global economic health – that is also a function of climate/weather. The Great Depression and the current depression are certainly well timed.
Hey David
How do the sunspot numbers stack up against Warrick Hughes’s rain fall trends for Perth, Western Australia?
Ciao
John Gorter
While your at it, how do the sunspot numbers add up to this?
Sahara Desert Greening Due to Climate Change?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-green-sahara.html
Hello Anthony,
On this site there is frequent discussion of the role of the sun in long-term climate variation, but I haven’t seen any discussion of the role of the moon. The British astronomer, Paul Murdin, has observed that the earth-moon system, a “double-planetary” system, is unique in the solar system. He speculates that the presence of our relatively large moon has stabilized the spin of the earth over billions of years, and this has made possible the evolution of life on the earth. Hansen (NASA) seems to have developed his CO2 “green-house” alarmism out of his early Venus work. Just the absence of a moon for Venus would seem to negate any earth-Venus analogy.
A better understanding of the cyclical forces that stabilize the earth’s climate would help in rebutting the AGW nonsense about “tipping points” and unique catastrophic events.
I am a professor of music theory, and have some limited knowledge of acoustics, ie compound wave forms, the harmonic series, noise, resonance etc. These phenomena are significant in Astronomy as well. It has occurred to me that the earth’s climate must be in some kind of long term “dynamic equilibrium”, like the complex wave of a richly timbred musical tone. To understand long-term climate change it is necessary to break down this complex wave into its major components, a kind of Fourier analysis of the climate signal.
Thank you for making this inspiring and informative site available to the public. I would be most interested in your opinion, and those of your readers concerning the influence of the moon on the earth’s long-term climate stability.
REPLY: Yep, it is all wave analysis. In fact there’s already a sound that describes GW theory right about now “Mythbusters in C4” 😉
Is this coincident pattern also observed for other large systems, say the Great Lakes or Mississippi/Missouri or the great Asian or European river systems? Or is this strictly a Southern Hemisphere observation? If you looked at the Columbia/Snake and/or the Fraser system in BC, do they differ from this pattern or from the Great Lakes or the Mississippi/Misouri patterns?
The article goes from sunspots to F10.7 flux, which may hold a lot of meaning for some and causes confusion in others. A few extra words of explanation would help a lot. Maybe a sticky sidebar or a reference to some other place.
The Canadian ag difficulties have been noticeable both this year and last.
Hope we see more of this type of data and observation based post.
It’s funny, well not really, but Lake Superior is supposed to be down significantly compared to normal.
The sunspots seem to be migrating to lower and higher latitudes these days. Is this a cause for concern?
Andrew W says:
July 22, 2010 at 9:18 pm (Edit)
I see sun spot numbers in Africa are different to sun spot numbers in South America.
This paper was brought to my attention on my blog a fortnight ago. The reason I haven’t done a post on it yet is I’m still trying to work out the full rationale behind the way Maus et al have processed the sunspot data. They say:
“When plotting together different quantities, the offset and the relative scales
are free parameters which are usually arbitrarily introduced. To avoid these
two artificial parameters, as a final step we have standardized the quantities
by subtracting the mean and dividing by the standard deviation of each series
shown, for the whole period 1909-2003.”
It seems on the face of it to be a reasonable approach, I think Mr Archibald should have mentioned it to avoid confusion though.
I had a lot of interest yesterday in a solar graph I created a year ago and put on my blog. I integrated the sunspot data as a cumulative count departing from the long term average which matches global temperature since 1880 well.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/nailing-the-solar-activity-global-temperature-divergence-lie/
There was a recent archaeological report published by Russian scientists that noted that during the Medieval Warm Period the flood planes of certain rivers and lakes in Russia were more extensively occupied than at present (a link can be found at C3 Headlines). Their conclusion was that warm periods were drier. This also seems to be true in the Sierra Nevada in California. I would suggest that in fact, different parts of the globe may respond differently and that there is no simple global correlation between sunspot numbers, temperature and rainfall.
Many European rivers (Danube, Rhine Rhone etc) were used for irrigation and navigation for centuries if not millennia, accurate records are made and kept.
No such correlation available as yet.
Duster says:
July 22, 2010 at 11:09 pm (Edit)
There was a recent archaeological report published by Russian scientists that noted that during the Medieval Warm Period the flood planes of certain rivers and lakes in Russia were more extensively occupied than at present (a link can be found at C3 Headlines). Their conclusion was that warm periods were drier.
Or maybe the population grew quickly during the warm times? The blossoming of architecture and large building works during the period in Europe indicates there was a lot of surplus labour and plenty to feed them with.
Wait for some bright alarmist to point out that man’s CO2 emissions cause reduced solar activity!
Gotta scrap that SUV and hand knit yourself a bicycle!
That F10.7 projection looks very pessimistic, given that the current flux is hitting 92, from a single small region of activity. Too early to call if activity will break out of the current level in 6 months time, or stay roughly the same for the next 3-4 years. Look at the very fast rise of some of the other curves once they pass the 100 mark. Agree 10.7 is the best plot to make though (still with a 13 month average)
John Gorter says:
July 22, 2010 at 9:40 pm
Fellow WUWT disciples, John is my neighbour across the road. He was the wretched cripple in a wheelchair that St Anthony could not cure at the dinner party I had while we were in Perth during the lecture tour. But I have seen John walking around with the aid of a walking stick more recently, so perhaps Anthony effected a partial cure. But what I was after was more like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww7WlSPi9gc
This DA post is just silly.
The sunspot figure for the Parana River has been obviously been adjusted (tortured) to get a better fit with the river flow data, and who knows how the river flow data was adjusted to better fit the sunspot data.
With the Lake Victoria data there was a huge block of data that didn’t fit the purposes of the authors, so they just disposed of it.
And what exactly is supposed to be the causation here? The water levels in one lake in Africa and the flow rates of one river in South America supposedly show a correlation with sunspots, whats the mechanism supposed to be, what’s the causal relationship that’s supposedly exists??
If this sort of vague half arsed manipulated data was being used to promote a theory that didn’t suit the people who follow this site you’d all be quite rightly condemning it as nonsense.
Correlation (or in this case half a correlation) is not causation.
Duster says:
July 22, 2010 at 11:09 pm
Yes, Climate is regional in the short term. Overall, through millenia, that too changes.
In these cases, we are considering precipitation in river basins. You can sort the data via solar cycle length or height and see what gives. More pieces to the puzzle of Climate.