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
@shrnfr
Ahem. Sorry. I see you were referring to a lake levels not Parana River level.
Sunspots are a proxy for solar magnetic field strength (SMFS). Think of them as weather events on the surface of the sun which are driven by cyclical fluctuations in SMFS. Magnetic fields propagate at the speed of light while their consequences, such as eddy currents within the fluid mass of the sun , propagate at much slower speeds.
So when SMFS fluctuates it effects the sun’s weather and the earth’s weather simultaneously. The earth’s atmosphere likely responds much faster than eddy currents within the sun due to differences like pressure, density, viscosity, and so forth.
Therefore it shouldn’t come as any great surprise if sunspots are a lagging indicator of SMFS-driven atmospheric changes on the earth.
I will take the opportunity to thank you Anthony Watt for visiting Perth. Australia. I enjoyed the speaches you, Bob Carter , David Archibald and Jo Nova, gave. It was nice to meet, hear and see you. Thank You.
In 1973 I was working in Argentina and had the possibility to see the Paraná river
and the waterfalls , Cataratas del Iguazú on the border between Argentina and Brazil. I stayed a week in Eldorado, Missiones. I spoke to a man who told me that some years ago there had been so little water in the river Iguazú a tributary to the Paraná so it was possible to walk over to Brazil´. When I saw the falls i did not believe him. I don’t do it to day, but . . . David, could it have been possible in 1963-1965 ?
Hi David, let me start out by thanking you for supplying this excellent information in your post.
As a previous blogger noted, at the beginning of this year the BBC showed a five part series ‘The World of Wonders’ and it was presented by Prof. Brian Cox. (Prof Cox is from the North – Manchester – and maybe the programme will be shown with sub-titles in the USofA?) Whilst studying and in his spare time Prof Cox was a popstar with a reasonable successful pop group here in the UK. Currently Prof. Cox is the popstar of BBC science!
In part 3 of the series WoW Prof Cox visited Iguazu and on the banks of that spectacular waterfall he discussed this very same graph with his Argentinian counterpart. Since watching that series I’ve been trying to get hold of the raw data, and you kindly supplied it.
A plausable explanation of why the energy from the sun would effect the rainfall is given in the programme.
Lastly, the work done by Prof Alexander in South Africa also showed the solar cycle and rainfall correlation.
What the sun triggers climate trends? You guys are nuts, the sun is only the source of energy and life on Earth. It couldn’t possibly effect climate. Only more taxes on CO2 can regulate climate sir. Trust in politicians, when do they ever lie? Come on folks, use some common sense.
DirkH says:
July 23, 2010 at 6:28 am
Oh, now i see. Yes, the sunspot number in Mauas’ paper looks strange. I understand tallblokes reservations.
Found the reason for the different shape of the sunspot data in Mauas’ paper; tallbloke has left out an important sentence:
“The data were smoothed with an 11-year running mean, detrended by substracting the long term component …”
It’s the 11 year running mean that changes the shapes! tallbloke, this is entirely legitimate IMHO. It just dampens high frequencies a little and, yes, changes the waveform severely, but entirely legit.
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Absent severe caveats, the legitimacy of such harsh and arbitrary filters would be borderline. More important, I don’t see how they could by themselves generate the difference in shapes we observe between the two graphs (Parana & Victoria), unless what we have is simply noise left after the main solar cycle has been averaged out. A running average and detrending should tend to equalise the peaks and drastically smooth the curve; but they shouldn’t create the differing patterns of maxima, still less introduce artefacts like the short-period wiggles matched between the sunspot and river flow curves (if they did it would prove these data processing methods misleading and inappropriate).
On the issue raised by Duster of the flood plains in Russia, It may be that the authors of the paper were suggesting that it was specifically the spring snow melt that caused the floods, rather than steady all year round rainfall. So low temperatures might play a direct role in increasing flooding, even if they also decreased yearly average rainfall.
I haven’t read the paper, but that was how I understood the digest.
W.J.R. Alexander (Professor Emeritus, Department of Civil and Biosystems Engineering, University of Pretoria; Member, United Nations Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters, 1994 – 2000) is a very important cross-reference here. Here’s two excerpts from his paper A critical assessment of current climate change science
and
Ref – vukcevic says:
July 23, 2010 at 1:40 am
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Thames-SSN.htm
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Thanks!
Maybe our latest “SunWatching” sputniks will give us the Rosetta Stone we need to figure out how so ‘small’ a thing can cause such an apparently big effect. Hummmm… Let’s hope!
Terry Jackson says: July 22, 2010 at 10:24 pm
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?
We discussed this before on WUWT, but I can’t find the thread. Maybe you can. This was the paper under discussion:
http://ks.water.usgs.gov/waterdata/climate/homepage.ijc.html
Abstract
Changes in total solar irradiance can be linked to changes in regional precipitation. A possible mechanism responsible for this linkage begins with the absorption of varying amounts of solar energy by the tropical oceans which creates ocean temperature anomalies. These anomalies are then transported by major ocean currents to locations where the stored energy is released into the atmosphere, altering atmospheric pressure and moisture patterns that can ultimately affect regional precipitation.
Correlation coefficients between annual differences in empirically modeled solar-irradiance variations and annual state-divisional precipitation in the United States for the period 1950-88 were computed with lag times of 0 to 7 years. The most significant correlations occur in the Pacific Northwest with a lag time of 4 years, which is approximately equal to the travel time of water within the Pacific Gyre from the western tropical Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Alaska. Precipitation in the Desert Southwest correlates significantly with solar irradiance lagged 3 and 5 years, which suggests a link with ocean-water temperature anomalies transported by the Equatorial Countercurrent as well as the North Pacific Gyre. With the correlations obtained, droughts coincide with periods of negative irradiance differences (dry high-pressure development), and wet periods coincidewith periods of positive differences (moist low-pressure development).
Perry, C.A., 1992, A Correlation between precipitation in the Western United States and solar-irradiance variations, in Proceedings of the American Water Resources Association Conference Managing Water Resources During Climate Change, Reno, Nevada, November 1-6, p. 721-729.
@gareth
I tried a little experiment to see what happens to a lower density pocket of fluid in higher density body of water. Motor oil is lower density than water and immiscible so I put a drop of it into a bucket of water. If your hypothesis is correct it should have floated a bit above the rest of the water and since it is immiscible and the water was still it should have remained a droplet floating a bit higher. Instead it very quickly formed a uniformly thin film across the top of the bucket. Why did that happen?
Martin Brumby says:
July 22, 2010 at 11:54 pm
Wait for some bright alarmist to point out that man’s CO2 emissions cause reduced solar activity!
Well… CO2 emission decline preceded sunspot decline, so, clearly it’s causal
8^)
(… It may actually be true, but, I wouldn’t count on it).
Paul Birch says:
July 23, 2010 at 8:52 am
“[…]Absent severe caveats, the legitimacy of such harsh and arbitrary filters would be borderline. […]”
So the sole justification for science is to find proportional relationships? 😉
This is all standard fare. But one thing is of interest:
DA: Our prediction for Solar Cycle 24 in terms of F10.7 flux is shown following:
Explain how this ‘prediction’ is arrived at.
Ralph said:
‘Why? – because we chose one degree of a circle to be equal to one day of the Earth’s orbit.’
I prefer the ancient theory that one degree was the portion of the circle occupied by an index finger held up at arm’s length to the horizon. It goes in 360 times from start to finish. Geometry is the mother of the sciences.
Pelke Sr. believes the IPPC conclusions are flawed. Regional models are combined together to produce the “global” data, and the resulting trends illustrate only the regions with a great disparity between highs and lows. Someone should compile the papers on this thread and others of a regional nature and associate the regional affects with both ocean oscillations and solar cycle. Some places get more, some less. For example, a negative ENSO is associated with cooler wetter conditions in Californicate but hot and dry in the desert southwest up into the lower Midwest in the USA. Whereas during the preceding El Nino it was cold and wet here in Kansas and the opposite in CA. These observations are in agreement. The papers I see coming from the alarmist team (real data, not modeled) are painted with a broad brush.
Correlations and suggested connective routes between the Sun and our climate are not mechanisms. Saying that the Sun affects jet stream positions is not a mechanism. I would prefer comments be more thorough if connective routes are being proposed, by including your hypothesized solar and atmospheric physics behind the suggested connection. To say that this information is yet to be discovered means you still have no mechanism.
DirkH says:
July 23, 2010 at 10:46 am
Paul Birch says:
July 23, 2010 at 8:52 am
“[…]Absent severe caveats, the legitimacy of such harsh and arbitrary filters would be borderline. […]”
So the sole justification for science is to find proportional relationships? 😉
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What? It’s to find relationships that are real, not introduced as an artefact of the data processing. Take two sets of random data, put them through the same heavy filtering, and lo and behold you’ll get a correlation. But the causal connection is merely the arbitrary filter you chose, nothing deeper than that. This may not be quite as bad as that, but it’s definitely dodgy.
Dr.Archibald: This deserves also your attention:
The known Argentinian geologist Miguel Gonzales, in his studies in the “Salinas del bebedero”, a salt lake in Argentina, http://www.springerlink.com/content/m11m129238u61484/
all these weather changes coincide with solar minimums like the Maunder minimum, which produced drought in the Argentinian “pampa” (plains), and which it is happening again now. So, in general, we have different weather systems: one west of the andes and the other east of the andes.
He studied a dried salt lake called “Salinas del Bebedero”, he found that this salt lake filled with water during solar minimums.
Also this one: Of S. M. Yousef et Al.
Several years of drought conditions similar to those that happened around 1900 (When swum south of the Sobat connection to the Nile were dried, similar dryness were also observed in Bahr – El-Zaraf) are expected to prevail over Uganda and other Equatorial Lake countries at 2009±2-3 years,2021± 2-3 and perhaps 2033± 2-3 years.
http://www.google.es/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fvirtualacademia.com%2Fpdf%2Fcli222_234.pdf&ei=AehJTIrgJILlnAflxMzjDQ&usg=AFQjCNFIlPLQPxVf9Lqj1V5lGrywTfhB4A
24 year drought in central South America
As shown above, Geologist Miguel Gonzales says:
So, in general, we have different weather systems: one west of the andes and the other east of the andes.
Lucy Skywalker says:
July 23, 2010 at 2:29 am (Edit)
alan says: July 22, 2010 at 10:13 pm
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… 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…
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.
Thanks for the props Lucy-Anne, and thanks for the book recommndation, I’ve ordered a copy. Richard Holle is a very, very bright bloke, and is a semi-rgular contributor on my blog as well as here. Paul Vaughan too has given a couple of clues that the Moon is hiding behind the Sun’s tails, having a sometimes concurrent, sometimes distinct effect on the atmosphere and ocean. Progress is being made understanding this stuff, and the fundamental ratios and harmonic series which show up in everything from electron orbital shells to snail shells and from orbits to orrerys are keys to the puzzle.
Pamela Gray says:
July 23, 2010 at 11:35 am
There are thousands of peoples on this earth who know the mechanisms that others won’t accept. Knowledge defends itself, it is not neither hidden nor esoteric, it is usually rejected by those who “have not eyes to see” or “ears to hear”.
Lucy Skywalker says:
July 23, 2010 at 2:29 am
This is for you:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/21067369/In-Search-Of-The-Miraculous
To Professor Alan of music theory:
The most important word in the universe is “resonance”. Tesla understood the power of resonance and developed most of his inventions around this principle. Resonance is ultimately where we will find our energy salvation by harnassing the vast plasma of the electric universe.
And when cycles interfere and refract, things happen, sometimes suddenly and violently. Climate change is solely dictated by planetary mechanics. The 11-year Sun spot cycles driven by Jupiter and Saturn. Then there are the miriad other cycles, such as, Gleisberg, Juno, Mayewski, Hallstatt, etc. Neptune and Uranus drive solar flare and intensity cycles. The moon drives tidal cycles as does the Earth, Venus and Jupiter. The magnetic giants Jupiter and Uranus trigger the Sun’s 18,000 year magnetic reversal. The Earth’s own precession cycle drives its own 11,500 year magnetic reversal. Everything is driven by cycles. It is the elephant in the room of climate change. CO2 is but the flea on the elephant’s ass, and is just coming along for the ride.