TITLE
DATA CORRELATION BETWEEN SUNSPOT ACTIVITY AND
RAINFALL FROM – 1892 TO – 1942
By
Randy K. Pruitt
A Preview and Overview
Date – 06/16/11
Original Presentation for PHS – 114 – 02, Professor Bruce
Oldfield’s Meteorology Class Dated 13 December 1988 at
Broome Community College (BCC), Binghamton New York
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Above is an image of the title page of the data correlation
project between sunspot activity and rainfall taken from five
sectional areas across the United States from 1892 to 1942
that I undertook in 1988, here in 2011 with all the high tech
wizardry of our present time I curiously find myself looking
back at this now twenty three year old project spurred on by
an unusual quiet period of solar activity and what it may
mean to us humans living on this frail sphere called the Earth
frankly at the mercy of anything our sun throws our way.
Rather than being poised in a swing back up toward solar
maximum we are seeing that our sun is not doing much of
anything in terms of sunspots thus increasing solar activity.
According to Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center
in a statement to science NASA headlines he says “We're
experiencing a very deep solar minimum.” In the article Deep
Solar Minimum it notes that in 2008 no sunspots were
observed on 266 of the 366 days for that year making the
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spotless days by percentage 72.68% for 2008 and what is
more puzzling is that for 2009 the numbers appear to be lower
still as of March 31st at least 78 days were spotless out of 90
making it a higher percentage of 86.67% of days with no
sunspots showing. As David Hathaway of the Marshall Space
Flight Center said "This is the quietest sun we've seen in
almost a century.” This was a reference back to 1913 when
there were 311 days where no sunspots were seen. But what
does this mean to us on our world if and I say if our sun were
for some reason to stay quiet for an extended period of time.
We know in the past such occurrences happened as with what
became known as the Maunder Minimum when few sunspots
were seen from 1645 to around 1715 when for the first time in
recorded history the Thames River in London became frozen
over and the term the Little Ice Age became popular for that
period. Also ice core and tree ring research suggests that in
the 7th century AD what was termed a Mini Ice Age occurred
and further back some 9000 years BC a pronounced spike
downward is seen and of course going back to the last Ice Age
the Wisconsin event a deep long cold period is noted.
Figure 1
To the left taken from the
educational faculty
research at U.C.R. are
seen long period
undulating temperature
variances with our sun
being the most likely
driver across the last
18,000 year period.
What we may be looking at in the above Figure 1 graph is
evidence of a continuing long and short term undulating
variable pattern of solar output. From any one point in time it
may appear set and static a steady state star but seen across
greater time periods our sun may behave more like a mighty
fusion engine with a governor on that engine that goes up and
down over time causing the effects seen in Figure 1 where the
sunspot cycles are nothing more than another stroke of a
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piston firing (magnetic recoil discharge), where that piston
fires to soon, right on time or misfires entirely as was seen
with the Maunder Minimum.
Within the construct of the coming sunspot rainfall data
correlation program I shall out of a sense of necessity discuss
the rules of the road. Here in the above image as presented by
Professor Oldfield is the constructs expected for scientific
research. A few years back I became aware of a trendy new
slang term that kept popping up called “Data Mining”. At first I
thought how nice a new slang phrase for doing research and
at the time I saw nothing wrong with that. Though over time I
began to realize something, what people were doing when they
were as they say “Data Mining” in many cases was nothing
more than jumping around from website to website, Google
here and Google there extracting information already
composed by other authors through articles written and so on
going wily nil in the process where organization seemed
unimportant but somehow in their minds this constituted
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scientific research as they understood it. Of course they
couldn’t be farther from the truth.
So in the program I shall discuss the scientific research
process that was employed in this project as a template
starting with the Project Proposal its construction and lay out
along with and most importantly the Final Report Composition
and its requirements. I will cover the following:
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Project Proposals
Cover Sheets
Abstracts
Procedures
Sample Calculations
Tabulated Data and Results
Discussion and Conclusions
Bibliography
Original Data Sheets
All of these above elements were applied to this sunspot
rainfall data correlation project supervised by Professor
Oldfield and approved by the Physics Department at Broome
Community College at Binghamton New York.
When I am done with the program you will have a clear idea of
how to construct a scientific research project. A challenge I
hope all people at some point in their lives would undertake.
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Here above is an example of one of the original data sheets for
the project a print out of the Helios II sunspot data. One of the
issues I faced was that I had to reconcile this data rendering it
useful for comparison purposes. As you may note above the
data set printout is what is called “Bipolar” meaning that it
extends in both the positive and negative directions starting at
zero. Since all my rainfall data was positive this posed a
problem in that in order to compare the Helios II sunspot data
I had to convert all the negative factors to positive ones to
make it work. This is but one issue or problem I ran into while
engaging this project. One of the things I shall address in the
program are the problem issues I encountered along the way
and the steps taken to solve those problems.
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Above the Helios II Bipolar graphical display before correction,
note the yellow highlighted area. This was the sunspot data
time period covered by the project.
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Above is an example of a rainfall data sheet acquired from the
Climatological Data Center. This particular page is exemplary
as to how the data was displayed. Here with the Georgia
Section they sent me data for the years specified however if
you look closely this sheet like the others specified one
particular month across those time periods in this case you
are looking at the month of January rainfall data from 1892 to
1943 all the way down the column. This means I had to collate
the data out of twelve sheets from January through December
for each individual section across those time periods. So for
the five sections I had sixty sheets of data to collate and
disseminate out into usable form as a contiguous time line of
data. This is one of the problems you run into when you are
truly “Data Mining” and you are looking at it folks.
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Here above is a printout of the Georgia Section data from 1892
to 1927 as no more data could be added into this one chart.
What you are seeing is a printout of the Video Show Pictureit
Display System a program used in 1988 for the display of
economic and marketing data (money and sales forecasting)
for business programs and applications. This system was
under the operational control of the business department at
BCC. You are also seeing a printout from the first full color
laser printer in use at BCC. What is more, according to the
business department this was the very first time anyone there
ever heard of the Video Show Projection System being used for
scientific application. And why was I using it? I needed
something that could handle the amount of data I was looking
at. Wouldn’t you know that those business people would have
such a thing to count all those dollars and sales. Good thing
though without it in 1988 I would not have been able to pull
this project off. It was a DOS operating system running with
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BASIC so in order for me to operate the thing I had to learn
BASIC as it applied to DOS with the data entry portion of it.
Just another hurtle in the real “Data Mining” process. Oh and
the Physics Department had to pay the Business Department
for the color printouts you are looking at. How does that
sound for inter department cooperation. But the printouts look
really nice and unlike excel you are able to run with two
independent Y axis one the left and one right side both with
limited data storage compared to excel.
Below though much easier to construct is the same data
displayed of the Georgia Section and below it the Georgia
Section – Two as it took two charts to do with the Video Show
Program what with excel only takes one. I know for a fact that
excel is a vastly more user friendly program for data entry
purposes but somehow the Video Show Display does seem to
have a much cleaner smooth appearance. What do you folks
think?
Georgia Section 1892 - to - 1943 Sunspot verses Rainfall
Data Correlation
Sunspots Verses
Rainfall
140
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
2345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123
Yearly Increments
Rainfall in Inches
Sunspots in Numbers
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Here above finalized the data input for the Georgia Section
data covering the years from 1927 to 1942.
According to Noel Sheppard in an article called Scientists
Refute IPCC’s Dismissal of Sunspot Connection to Climate
Change, published in Newsbusters.org 25 June 2007 citing a
South African Sunspot and Rainfall study states “Regardless,
after some history was provided, followed by a detailed
analysis, the paper concluded that droughts and heavyrainfall periods seem to have a 21-year cycle. As fate would
have it, sunspot activity seems to follow a roughly analogous
21-year cycle, with minimum solar activity showing a high
correlation with maximum rainfall/floods, and maximum
sunspot activity occurring largely coincident with droughts.”
Another sign that the evidence is mounting
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Georgia Section 1892 - to - 1943 Sunspot verses Rainfall
Data Correlation
140
120
Sunspots Verses Rainfall
100
80
60
40
20
2
0
8
6
4
2
0
8
6
4
2
0
8
6
4
2
0
8
6
4
2
0
8
6
4
2
0
Yearly Increments
Rainfall in Inches
Sunspots in Numbers
Above I have exaggerated the Georgia Section graph to
accentuate the peaks and troughs making it easier for data
interpretation. And it also looks more like the Video Show
graphs.
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Here above as an example is climatological data for daily
precipitation for the Nebraska Section. From the various cities
noted on the left hand column such as North and South Platte
it is clear to see that not all the data for the every day of the
month listed across the top row filing down the columns are
filled in. What this means is that for those days no rainfall
occurred and that across the rows all the rainfall is added up
to the extreme right as the total column adding to the
Nebraska’s Section rainfall totals across and for the periods
noted. These daily precipitation sheets were used to
corroborate the monthly and therefore the annual totals used
in the study.
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References
Helios Two Sunspot Data Program, Kopernik Observatory,
Underwood Road, Vestal Center, New York
U.S. Climatological Data Charts, U.S. Department of
Commerce, Weather Bureau Section, Record Keeping at
the National Climatic Data Center, 151 Patton Avenue
the Federal Building, Asheville, North Carolina, 28810
Video Show Equipment, Pictureit Display Software, Business
Department, Broome Community College, Binghamton
New York
Aherns, Donald, C. (1988 3rd edition) Meteorology Today, West
Publishing Company
National Aeronautics and Space Administration, science
headline website; Retrieved on 09 January 2010, from
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/01apr_deepsol
arminimum.htm
Ananthaswamy, A. (2008, November 8) Does rainfall vary with
sunspot activity? New Scientist, Environment. Issue 2681
International Journal of Climatology (2006, November 28)
Indian rainfall in relation to the sunspot cycle: 1871-1978
Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy (2006, June) The
influence of solar activity on the rainfall over India: Cycleto-cycle variations: Volume 27 Numbers 2-3, P367-P372
DeLury, R.E. 1932, Forest and Outdoors, Vol. 28, P. 201;
1938, R.A.S.C. Jour., Vol. 32, pp. 105, 161.
Johnson, L. P. V. 1940, Can. J. Research, Section C,
Vol.18, p. 79.
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Seeds M.A. 1987, Exploring the Universe, Wadsworth
Publishing Company, Belmont, California 94002
U.C.R. Edu graphic display, Temperature changes on earth
during the past 18,000 years since 2005. Retrieved 11
January 2010, from
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/bronze/climate.ht
m
Noel Sheppard 2007, 25 June, Newbusters.org, Scientists
Refute IPCC’s Dismissal of Sunspot Connection to Climate
Change, Retrieved 12 January 2010, from
http://newsbusters.org/node/13731
Pruitt, R. K., Sunspot verses Rainfall Data Correlation Project
Preview, posted for retrieval from
http://www.planetarydevelopment.com/sunspotdataone.
ppt
Pruitt, R. K., Program Synopsis “Sunspot verses Rainfall Data
Correlation Project Preview” posted for retrieval from
http://www.planetarydevelopment.com/suntwo.htm
Pruitt, R. K. 1988, Data correlation between sunspot activity
and rainfall from – 1892 to – 1942, presented to PHS –
114 – 02, Professor Bruce Oldfield’s Meteorology Class
Dated 13 December 1988 at Broome Community College,
Binghamton New York
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