Influence of solar magnetic activity on the North American temperature record

Abstract

The effect of solar magnetic activity on the yearly mean average temperature is extracted from the historical record for much of North America. The level of solar activity is derived from the international sunspot number by the renormalized continuous wavelet transform using the Morlet basis to provide a running estimate of the power associated with the magnetic cycle. The solar activity gives the abscissa for a scatter plot of temperature for each station, from which the solar dependence and mean temperature are extracted. These parameters are then plotted against the latitude, longitude, and elevation for each station, revealing a dependence of their values on geophysical location. A mechanism to explain the latitudinal variation of the solar dependence is suggested.