Brace yourself for more cold winters to come

UK covered in snow January 2010
Credit: University of Dundee/NASA

Scientists have discovered a link between low solar activity and cold winters that could explain why despite global warming trends, the UK and other regions North East of the Atlantic Ocean are experiencing and heading for more frequent cold winters.

Mike Lockwood from STFC’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the University of Reading who led the work said of this year’s winter; “It’s been the 14th coldest in the last 160 years, yet global average temperature for the same period has been the 5th highest. We have discovered this kind of anomaly is significantly more common when solar activity is low”.

The results published in Environmental Research Letters describe how we are now moving into a period of low solar activity which is likely to result in UK winter temperatures more like those seen at the end of the seventeenth century.

The findings are different to previous efforts to explain the UK’s recent cold winters as they compare the most comprehensive, but regionally specific temperature data to the long-term behaviour of the Sun’s magnetic field to study the differences to the average trends for the entire Northern Hemisphere. More details can be found in the Institute of Physics press release (link opens in a new window) on this.