© NASA Earth Observatory. Public Domain
The average temperature increase on the globe from 1981 to February 2020 was 0.14°C per decade. The further development promises to be interesting, especially since a number of
research institutes expect a higher probability of a cooling La Nina in the Pacific towards the end of the year.
March's solar activity was very low with a sunspot number of 1.5. Activity in April rose slightly to 5.4. The first sunspots of the new cycle are showing.
What causes the sun to have an 11-year cycle?
Since the Dessau pharmacist Heinrich Samuel Schwabe discovered in 1843 that the sunspots of the sun increase and decrease in an 11-year cycle, science has been puzzling over the reason why this cycle lasts 11 years and why the solar magnetic field also changes its polarity in this rhythm: the north pole becomes the south pole and vice versa.
In July last year, scientists at the Helmholtz Centre in Dresden Rossendorf made a little-noticed but exciting discovery.
Every 11.07 years, the planets Venus, Earth and Jupiter are aligned quite precisely. At this point in time, their gravitational force acts jointly in one direction on the Sun.
"The agreement is amazingly accurate: we see a complete parallelism with the planets over 90 cycles," explains Frank Stefani, one of the authors of the publication
published in Solar Physics. Just as the gravitational pull of the Moon causes the tides on Earth, planets could move the hot plasma on the surface of the Sun. But the effect of a simple gravitational force is too weak to significantly disturb the flow in the Sun's interior, so the temporal coincidence has long been ignored.
Comment: Meanwhile in other parts of the US: 'Sure doesn't look like May': Lake-effect snow blows across Lake Superior coastline