The Maunder Minimum and the variable sun-earth connection [electronic resource] / Willie Wei-Hock Soon, Steven H. Yaskell.

ISBN:

9789812796868

9781281947888

Title:

The Maunder Minimum and the variable sun-earth connection [electronic resource] / Willie Wei-Hock Soon, Steven H. Yaskell.

Author:

Soon, Willie.

Personal Author:

Soon, Willie.

Publication Information:

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xviii, 278 pages) : illustrations

Contents:

1. A sun most pure and most lucid -- 2. Background of the Maunder Minimum -- 3. The Maunder Minimum: Europe, Asia, North America (as dated from c. A.D. 1620-A.D. 1650) -- 4. The Maunder Minimum: Europe, Asia, North America (as dated from c. A.D. 1650-A.D. 1720) -- 5. Surveying the Maunder Minimum -- 6. Maunder's immediate predecessors in delineating solar structure and behavior: towards understanding solar variability and sun-climate connections -- 7. Maunder's early life and associations -- 8. Maunder and the connection of sunspot behavior and geomagnetism: resolving "the fifty years' outstanding difficulty" -- 9. Studying aurora ... the Scandinavian and American connection: tree rings, moisture and the missing sunspot cycles -- 10. The family Maunder: the B.A.A. and astronomy for all -- 11. A particle theory for the sun-earth connection -- 12. Our knowledge of the sun and its variability today -- 13. Earth's atmosphere and its story: a perspective of past changes on the present -- 14. The Maunder Minimum and modern theories of the sun's cyclical machinery -- 15. Summary: cycles of the sun and their tie to Earth -- 16. The Maunders and their final story.

Local Note:

eBooks on EBSCOhost

Personal Subject:

Maunder, E. Walter (Edward Walter), 1851-1928.

Subject Term:

Sunspots.

Climatic changes.

Astronomers -- Great Britain.

Geographic Term:

Sun.

Soleil.

Added Author:

Yaskell, Steven H.

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

Click here to view

Publication Date:

2003

Publication Information:

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
523.74 22	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ONLINE	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

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Summary

This book takes an excursion through solar science, science history, and geoclimate with a husband and wife team who revealed some of our sun's most stubborn secrets.E Walter and Annie S D Maunder's work helped in understanding our sun's chemical, electromagnetic and plasma properties. They knew the sun's sunspot migration patterns and its variable, climate-affecting, inactive and active states in short and long time frames. An inactive solar period starting in the mid-seventeenth century lasted approximately seventy years, one that E Walter Maunder worked hard to make us understand: the Maunder Minimum of c 1620-1720 (which was posthumously named for him).With ongoing concern over global warming, and the continuing failure to identify root causes driving earth's climatic changes, the Maunders' story outlines how our cyclical sun can alter climate. The book goes on to view the sun-earth connection in terms of geomagnetic variation and climatic change; contemporary views on the sun's operating mechanisms are explored, and the effects these have on the earth over long and short time scales are pondered.If not a call to widen earth's climate research to include the sun, this book strives to illustrate how solar causes and effects can influence earth's climate in ways we must understand in order to enhance solar system research and our well-being.

Reviews (1)

Choice Review

Sunspots and other variations in solar activity impact the sun's luminosity. However, the effects of resulting variations in solar radiation on Earth's climate are still somewhat controversial. Wei-Hock Soon (Smithsonian) and Yaskell offer a readable and engaging summary of the history and current status of sunspot understanding, sunspot observation, and linkages between sunspots and changes in Earth's atmosphere. They thus cover some of the material in The Role of the Sun in Climate Change by Douglas V. Hoyt and Kenneth H. Shatten (1997). However, the book under review has a somewhat narrower focus, and although it briefly presents the causes of sunspots, mechanisms for reconstructing time series of their occurrence, and possible explanations of why they affect the climate of Earth, these components are somewhat secondary to the descriptions of people and personalities who have sought understanding of sunspots. Hence, in many regards, the book might be characterized as primarily a description of the evolution of science using the Maunder minimum of sunspot occurrence (and possible occurrence of a coincident period of cooler temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere) as a case study, rather than an in-depth analysis of the physics of sunspots or sun-earth climate connections. Interesting graphics; accurate index. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. General readers; graduate students. S. C. Pryor Indiana University