摘要:Recent research has suggested that relatively cold UK winters are more common
when solar activity is low (Lockwood et al 2010 Environ. Res. Lett.5 024001). Solar
activity during the current sunspot minimum has fallen to levels unknown since
the start of the 20th century (Lockwood 2010 Proc. R. Soc. A 466 303–29) and
records of past solar variations inferred from cosmogenic isotopes (Abreu et al 2008
Geophys. Res. Lett.35 L20109) and geomagnetic activity data (Lockwood et al 2009
Astrophys. J.700 937–44) suggest that the current grand solar maximum is coming
to an end and hence that solar activity can be expected to continue to decline.
Combining cosmogenic isotope data with the long record of temperatures measured in
central England, we estimate how solar change could influence the probability in
the future of further UK winters that are cold, relative to the hemispheric mean
temperature, if all other factors remain constant. Global warming is taken into
account only through the detrending using mean hemispheric temperatures. We
show that some predictive skill may be obtained by including the solar effect.