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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Terry Jackson says:
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?
I’m interested in investigating the same question with relation to the Clutha Catchment in New Zealand. I have our river flow data going back 80 years, but I’m having trouble finding the raw sunspot numbers. All the online sites I’ve looked at give graphs but no numbers.
The methodolgy described in Mauas et al is described clearly enough to attempt to replicate it with New Zealands catchments.
I wonder if sunspots throw particles that pepper over the Earth’s skies, seeding clouds for more rain.
Jantar says:
July 23, 2010 at 12:56 am (Edit)
I’m having trouble finding the raw sunspot numbers. All the online sites I’ve looked at give graphs but no numbers.
Graph them on http://www.woodfortrees.org and then hit the raw data link under the graph.
Pablo Mauas was actually featured in a BBC documentary about the Solar System this year:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qyxfb
But I remain sceptical. There are a lot of river systems in the world. Do they all exhibit the same pattern?
Andrew W says:
July 23, 2010 at 12:42 am (Edit)
This DA post is just silly.
Rather than jumping to a hasty conclusion that Maus et al are silly, and Anthony Watts is silly for posting their work, you might stop to consider what other metric correlates with these streamflows, even just for half the time. You may also stop to consider than Maus et al have spent considerably more time thinking about this stuff than you have.
Thanks, Tallbloke. That is just what I needed.
Very interesting. Another one to file under the “it’s the sun, stupid” category?
It may not be that the WORLD is drier when there are fewer sunspots, but that our weather patterns change (we appear to be having a lowering of the jetstreams towards the equator recently).
It may just happen that the Parana River is in just the right location to always be drier when these new weather patterns establish themselves. Other rivers on other continents may not be effected, or even get wetter.
Whatever the case, it is a striking correlation, and I am surprised nobody has noticed it before. Just what are all these climate scientists doing, to have not noticed this? Oh, yes, massaging the data in a darkened room in East Anglia.
P.S. Can anyone take some core samples from the Prarana River, to see what it was doing over the last 10,000 years??
What’s that you say? No funding left? Spent it all on massaging the data and propaganda trips to the Arctic??
.
I think the first of Mason’s two Lake Victoia levels graphs is interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly the jump in the sixties lends support to ‘decade later response to solar activity’ noted in David Archibalds last post, following the record high solar cycle in the late 1950’s. Secondly, the decline in lake level since then matches the decline in solar cycle amplitudes (but not overall activity as noted on my blog yesterday – link above).
This says to me that David Archibalds assertion that cooler is drier is incorrect as a general principle on decadal scales, unless the country tmperature data in Africa shows cooling in the late C20th? My conclusion contingent on that is that there is a non-linear response in the Earth’s feedbacks which is linked to UV, ozone, gomagnetism and rainfall rather than temperature and rainfall.
tallbloke says:
July 22, 2010 at 10:42 pm
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:
It seems on the face of it to be a reasonable approach, I think Mr Archibald should have mentioned it to avoid confusion though.
‘Normalising’ the 2 sets of data in this way is a “reasonable approach”. It will result in both sets of data having a distribution with mean=0; SD=1. That’s fine – but it still doesn’t look right. The sunspot plot should still follow the peaks and troughs of the sunspot cycle. Ther doesn’t appear to be a trend (it’s probably been removed) and the south american sunspots have declined to below average since the late 1970s.
Is here a link to this paper (non-pay)?
Perhaps the key issue is to highlight which parts of the world show INCREASED rainfall as sunspot numbers drop and thus think about how to share resources across the decades in a manner which says that rain falls somewhere on earth all the time, it’s just the place where it falls may oscillate quite a lot?
Probably the same can be said about agriculture trends…..
Andrew W says:
July 23, 2010 at 12:42 am
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.
Perhaps you should go back and review the Journal it was posted in. The complete paper is available at http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1003/1003.0414v1.pdf
The whole purpose of the paper has nothing to do with climate change, but instead looks at flows in rivers. I am particularly interested as it may assist with flood forecasting, energy management and long term energy policy.
Nowhere in the paper is there any hint of a claim of a causal nature, just a correlation. And if such a correlation exists in other rivers as well, then lives and property may be saved; better use made of hydro electric resources, and better planning for new energy infrastructure.
For those interested, here are the Parana River levels post 1990:
http://www.scielo.br/img/revistas/bjb/v69n2s0/a24fig09.gif
Here is a 2008 article on the same subject:
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/36477
.
No matter how convincing the evidence, the warmists will always say it’s the CO2.
Why do some changes in the flow of the Parana appear to precede changes in the number of sunspots?
Records for the rainfall and runoff for river Thames above Teddington are available since 1885.
I have made a graph comparison with the sunspot records.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Thames-SSN.htm
You are invited to comment on the correlation as valid or not.
John Finn says:
July 23, 2010 at 1:27 am
‘Normalising’ the 2 sets of data in this way is a “reasonable approach”. It will result in both sets of data having a distribution with mean=0; SD=1. That’s fine – but it still doesn’t look right. The sunspot plot should still follow the peaks and troughs of the sunspot cycle. Ther doesn’t appear to be a trend (it’s probably been removed) and the south american sunspots have declined to below average since the late 1970s.
Is here a link to this paper (non-pay)?
http://www.iafe.uba.ar/httpdocs/reprint_parana.pdf
I agree the plot looks odd, which is why I hadn’t posted about it yet.
Replication replication replication!
Yarmy says:
July 23, 2010 at 1:09 am
There are a lot of river systems in the world. Do they all exhibit the same pattern?
Some have more confounding variables affecting their catchments than others…
Re: my last post
John Finn says:
July 23, 2010 at 1:27 am
“late 1970s” should read “mid 1980s”
Tallbloke,
Your link is to Mauas et al 2008. I believe this is an earlier attempt at the same work.
[reply]Quite right, my mistake. RT-mod
tallbloke says:
July 23, 2010 at 1:40 am
Thanks for the link.
[reply] See Jantar’s comment above. RT-mod
Re:
Sean Houlihane says:
July 23, 2010 at 12:12 am
That F10.7 projection looks very pessimistic, given that the current flux is hitting 92
———–
Where are you getting that number? I ask because solarcycle24.com (right sidebar) links to NOAA SWPC and shows current f10.7 flux at 72.6 and dropping, with the last smoothed monthly reading of 92 (as you quote) not occurring since 2005.
Do you have a better data source?
Cheers,
BillN
Well, I for one welcome the research. It is very interesting. It’s the Sun stupid!
At the risk of being a bore, I again recall with fascination the BBC2 Horizon prog 30+ years ago all about Sunspots, you know, that time when the BBC was a trusted, well respected, honourable, & factual public broadcaster. It showed correlations in Sunspot activity, with beatle-mania, heights of hem-lines for mini-skirts, & a whole host of other things that were at times quite peculiar yet astonishing. It may have had many scientific errors in it I don’t know, & correlations can be drawn in almost anything if you look hard enough (except the Sun of course) but it was an honest programme, something the BBC would do well to revisit from time to time to remind them who pays their (large) wages, & what scientific integrity used to be!
Human beings are simply another ape with an intelligent brain (allegedly, Big-Al). We may have technically moved away from the cave, but mentally we’re still in it, hence all the “cry-witch” hysteria about AGW & some of the more laughable claims about it! We exhibit a broad range of primitive characteristics from herd instincts to mass hysteria & other irrational behaviour. Who knows how & what affects us on a global scale & even solar sytem scales. If cosmic rays & Solar-magnetic flux can affect our climtate, what effects could it have on the human mind or the behaviour of other fauna for that matter? If one wants to study a range of human behavours, study chimps & monkeys in their primitive societies! We’re not much different at times. I sometimes get exasperated at all the papers about Solar correlations & climate, yet some people go on blinkered refusing to acknowledge such things exist. I suspect the Sun affects our home far more than we like to think, & that we could even imagine if the truth were finally known! In the LIA, it was a time of great witch hunting & relegious zealotry in England for example, fiercely pro-protestant & anti-catholic, everyone looking to pin the blame for anything, we even had a Minister for Climate Change, sorry, Witchfinder-General I meant to say, to point out our ancestors’ evil wicked ways & to show them how to atone for their mortal sins. Some poor crone or youthful beauty would be seized & tried as a witch, all because she rubbed a herb on a scratch to heal it, she’d be dunked in a pond until she either drowend or didn’t, if she drowned she was innocent, if she survived, she would be hung or burned at the stake. Sounds reasonable behaviour to me! Nothing like that exists today thank goodness! Sounds not too disimilar to that fellow over here who was recently struck off as a Dr because as a medical expert on Munchausan Syndrome, his expertise was such that if an accused woman publicly protested her innocence, that was apparently even greater proof of her guilt, her denial, according to him, he was that good, & worse still people believed him for some time! I digress, snip away!
Re:
Sean Houlihane
and my own prev post
——
Okay, trying to figure out on my own, the solarcycle24.com number I quoted above is the previous month (June in this case) average flux. The Joint USAF/NOAA Report of Solar and Geophysical Activity SDF Number 202 Issued at 2200Z on 21 Jul 2010 indicates observed flux of 89.0. Above that report on:
http://www.solarcycle24.com/daily.htm
the “fluxadjflux” value is 91.9 at 2300fluxtime down from 92.0 at 2000fluxtime.
So, I withdraw my question and thank you for prompting my further education. 🙂
Cheers,
BillN
I’d like to recommend you visit the work of Tallbloke and Richard Holle, both of whom work with cycles. Tallbloke is a good starting-point. Richard has taken hold of the lunar nodal cycle in developing weather predictions that years ahead of time work apparently just as well as the normal forecasts made just days ahead.
Also I’d like to recommend (to all readers here) an extraordinary little book whose tiny size thoroughly belies its beauty and its startling import. It’s like Kepler’s work has enabled the author to find what Kepler sought but failed to find himself, the harmonies of the spheres. It will speak particularly to you as a musician. Best to refer you to Amazon Books. A Little Book of Coincidence. It is about the highly exact geometrical relationships pervading the whole solar system and rich in pi and phi. Only exactitudes over 99% are even reported.