Solar Cycles in 150 Years of Global Sea Surface Temperature Data?
1 hour ago Anthony Watts
Note: we’ve looked at solar to temperature correlations many times on WUWT, and our resident stats guru Willis Eschenbach has always found some flaw in the solar cycles to temperature analysis done by others. They say this in the paper:
It is often thought that the response to solar cycle is too weak at the surface to be detectable, and that even if a signal is claimed to have been found its statistical significance cannot be established. Using 150 yr of sea surface temperature data from 1854 to 2007 and an objective method, we found a robust signal of warming over solar max and cooling over solar min, with high statistical significance in the time domain.
We’ll see if this one pans out -Anthony
This paper demonstrates that a solar cycle response exists in global sea surface temperatures (SST). The abstract says “The signal is robust provided that the years near the Second World War are excluded, during which transitions from British ships to U.S. ships introduced warm bias in the SST.”
Signals of warming during solar maximum and cooling during solar minimum years are found in the global SST over the 14 cycles from 1854–2007. The magnitude of the solar cycle response averaged over the oceans between 60°S and 60°N is about 0.1°C of warming for each W/m2 variation of the total solar irradiance. This value was determined after excluding suspected bad data. The multidecadal trend of response to solar forcing is found to account for about a quarter of the observed warming in SST during the past 150 yr.
Some figures from the paper:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/08/14/solar-cycles-in-150-years-of-global-sea-surface-temperature-data/
