Sunshine, Earthshine and Climate Change: II. Solar Origins of Variations in the Earth's Albedo

Details Sunshine, Earthshine and Climate Change: II. Solar Origins of Variations in the Earth's Albedo Sunshine, Earthshine and Climate Change: II. Solar Origins of Variations in the Earth's Albedo

Jun 2003

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003jkas...36s..83g&link_type=abstract

Journal of the Korean Astronomical Society, vol. 36, S1, pp. S83-S91

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

2

Earth: Albedo, Global Climate, Moon:Reflection

Scientific paper

There are terrestrial signatures of the solar activity cycle in ice core data (Ram & Stoltz 1999), but the variations in the sun's irradiance over the cycle seem too small to account for the signature (Lean 1997; Goode & Dziembowski 2003). Thus, one would expect that the signature must arise from an indirect effect(s) of solar activity. Such an indirect effect would be expected to manifest itself in the earth's reflectance. Further, the earth's climate depends directly on the albedo. Continuous observations of the earthshine have been carried out from Big Bear Solar Observatory since December 1998, with some more sporadic measurements made during the years 1994 and 1995. We have determined the annual albedos both from our observations and from simulations utilizing the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) scene model and various datasets for the cloud cover, as well as snow and ice cover. With these, we look for inter-annual and longer-term changes in the earth's total reflectance, or Bond albedo. We find that both our observations and simulations indicate that the albedo was significantly higher during 1994-1995 (activity minimum) than for the more recent period covering 1999-2001 (activity maximum). However, the sizes of the changes seem somewhat discrepant. Possible indirect solar influences on the earth's Bond albedo are discussed to emphasize that our earthshine data are already sufficiently precise to detect, if they occur, any meaningful changes in the earth's reflectance. Still greater precision will occur as we expand our single site observations to a global network.

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