Solar signals in global climatic change

Based on the physical background that varying solar activity should lead to variations of the ‘solar constant’ and that the climate system may respond sensitively even to small solar variations, a correlation analysis is performed where hemispheric and global averages of the annual mean surface air temperature are compared with the variations of a variety of solar forcing parameters: sunspots, related hypotheses including variations of the quasi-eleven-year solar cycle length, solar diameter variations and gravitational effects. This analysis is based on the 1881–1988 period, for the northern hemisphere including proxy data 1671–1988. Cross correlations and correlations moving in time reveal some instability effects which are hard to interpret. The temperature variance components which may be hypothetically explained by solar forcing are small. Similarly, a seasonal and regional signal and signal-to-noise analysis based on a gridded temperature time series 1890–1985 reveals small signals which do not exceed roughly 1.5 K in the arctic winter (maximum) or 0.2-0.3 K on a global average.