Satellite Communications White Papers

Global Radiation Changes in the Lower Atmosphere Related to Solar Activity Phenomena

• Tags:
• satellite communications,
• cycle,
• activity,
• input

Overview The Earth's climate is known to depend strongly on the solar radiation input in the lower atmosphere, being an important energy source of atmospheric circulation. Although the solar irradiance changes at the Earth's orbit turned out to be too small (~0.1% in the 11-year cycle) to produce appreciable effects on the atmosphere processes, the solar radiation input in the lower atmosphere varies significantly depending on the cloudiness state, and these variations in turn influence to a large extent dynamic processes in the troposphere. Thus the study of solar radiation flux variability in the lower atmosphere is of particular importance to understand the physical mechanism of solar activity effects on the atmospheric circulation, weather, and climate.

Variations of solar energy input in the lower atmosphere associated with different cosmophysical phenomena in the 11-year solar cycle were analyzed at the network of actinometric stations of Russia for the period 1961-1986. It is shown that the solar radiation fluxes at different latitudes may be strongly affected by galactic cosmic ray (GCR) variations, solar flare activity, and auroral phenomena, their influences revealing both the latitudinal and the seasonal dependencies. The found effects of solar activity on the radiation fluxes seem to provide evidences of cloud cover variations associated with the phenomena under study. The changes in the solar radiation input in the 11-year cycle amount to (4-6)% and may be of significant importance for the radiation budget of the lower atmosphere.

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