Solar and geomagnetic activity and their influences on the terrestrial environment.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

This interdisciplinary research tries to establish long-term correlations between solar/geomagnetic activity and climate parameters at longer time-scales than currently approached (11- and 22-year solar cycles). The main tasks of the project are: to analyze solar/geomagnetic activity described by various indices and climatic parameters such as surface air temperature and precipitation from different databases (observational data and reanalyzed gridded data) for marking out trends and periodicities in data at Earth’s surface and several levels in the troposhere; to investigate the long-term statistical correlation, at Schwabe and Hale solar cycles timescales, between solar/geomagnetic activity and climatic parameters at local, regional and continental (Europe, North America) scales. The detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA), which is a well-established method for the detection of long-range correlations in time series, will be applied to data and trends of different order will be eliminated, so that it might gain an insight into the scaling behavior of the natural variability as well as into the trends in the considered time series.