Sun Activity Link to Cold winters in UK and Europe

The UK and continental Europe could be gripped by more frequent cold winters in the future as a result of low solar activity, say researchers, who identified a link between fewer sunspots and atmospheric conditions that "block" warm, westerly winds reaching Europe during winter months, according to BBC News.

But they added that the phenomenon only affected a limited region and would not alter the overall global warming trend. The findings appear in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

"By recent standards, we have just had what could be called a very cold winter and I wanted to see if this was just another coincidence or statistically robust," said lead author Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics at the University of Reading, UK.

To examine whether there was a link, Professor Lockwood and his co-authors compared past levels of solar activity with the Central England Temperature (CET) record, which is the world's longest continuous instrumental record of such data.

The researchers used the 351-year CET record because it provided data that went back to the beginning of the Maunder Minimum, a prolonged period of very low activity on the Sun that lasted about half a century.

He said the present decline started in 1985 and was currently about "half way back to a Maunder Minimum condition." This allowed the team to compare recent years with what happened in the late 1600s.

"We found that you could accommodate both the Maunder Minimum and the last few years into the same framework," said he.