Effects on winter circulation of short and long term solar wind changes

There is much uncertainty about the mechanism(s) of observed linkages between solar activity and weather and climate change, while there is a wealth of data to show that such linkages exist (a few examples are as in Roberts and Olson, 1973; Eddy, 1976; Fleitmann et al., 2003; Wang et al., 2005). Responses of the lower atmosphere to space weather for short timescales (a few hours to a few days) as well as long timescales (seasonal to decadal) have been observed. Changes in tropospheric dynamics are found to correlate on short time scales with solar wind parameters such as its speed and the components of its magnetic field. In addition, longer term tropospheric and stratospheric changes correlate with total solar irradiance and solar ultraviolet irradiance as well as space weather parameters (Gray et al., 2010). The influences of energetic space particles and space electric and magnetic fields can potentially account for some of the variability in the lower atmosphere, such as in cloud cover (Marsh and Svensmark,2003; Kniveton and Tinsley, 2004) polar surface pressure (Burns et al., 2008) and winter cyclone vorticity (Roberts and Olson, 1973; Svalgaard, 1973; Tinsley and Deen, 1991; Veretenenko and Thejll, 2004; Tinsley et al., 2012).