Sunspot-Climatic Relationships in Fluctuations of Glaciers in the Alps and Atmospheric Precipitation in Korea

Abstract

Relationships between solar activity and climate were studied from the long-term variations of early summer rainfall at Seoul in Korea and from the fluctuations of the Savoie glaciers of the Alps.
It is concluded that strong solar activity, as evidenced by sunspot highs, tends to favor a meridional type of circulation and to intensify thermal convection between middle and high latitudes.
Opposite variation of the high-latitude glaciers and the Alpine glaciers, such as in the neighborhoods of the years 1700 and 1750, may be explained in terms of heat lost in the middle latiudes and gained in the high latitudes.
The great glacier shrinkage of the last forty years or so, which has run parallel in both the middle and the high latitudes, seems rather an exceptional phenomenon from the standpoint of past history. It is ascribable to an extraordinarily intensified transfer of heat from the lower latitudes and corresponds to a chaotic cellular pattern of general circulation.