The Sun's Influence on Climate
Joanna D. Haigh and Peter Cargill
Abstract
The Earth's climate system depends entirely on the Sun for its energy. Solar radiation warms the atmosphere and is fundamental to atmospheric composition, while the distribution of solar heating across the planet produces global wind patterns and contributes to the formation of clouds, storms, and rainfall. This book provides an unparalleled introduction to this vitally important relationship. The book covers the basic properties of the Earth's climate system, the structure and behavior of the Sun, and the absorption of solar radiation in the atmosphere. It explains how solar activity varies a ... More
The Earth's climate system depends entirely on the Sun for its energy. Solar radiation warms the atmosphere and is fundamental to atmospheric composition, while the distribution of solar heating across the planet produces global wind patterns and contributes to the formation of clouds, storms, and rainfall. This book provides an unparalleled introduction to this vitally important relationship. The book covers the basic properties of the Earth's climate system, the structure and behavior of the Sun, and the absorption of solar radiation in the atmosphere. It explains how solar activity varies and how these variations affect the Earth's environment, from long-term paleoclimate effects to century timescales in the context of human-induced climate change, and from signals of the 11-year sunspot cycle to the impacts of solar emissions on space weather in our planet's upper atmosphere.
Keywords:
Earth,
Sun,
solar radiation,
atmospheric composition,
solar heating,
global wind patterns,
climate system,
paleoclimate,
climate change,
solar emissions
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780691153834 |
| Published to Princeton Scholarship Online: October 2017 |
DOI:10.23943/princeton/9780691153834.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Joanna D. Haigh, author
Imperial College London
Peter Cargill, author
Imperial College London
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