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Detection of Solar Cycle Signal in the Tropospheric Temperature using COSMIC Data


Affiliations
1 Radio and Atmospheric Physics Lab, Rajdhani College, University of Delhi, Delhi 110 015, India
2 Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), Nainital 263 002, India
3 Department of Applied Physics, Delhi Technical University, Delhi 110 042, India
4 Department of Geophysics, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606850, India
 

Influence of the solar cycle on temperature structure is examined using radio occultation measurements by COSMIC/FORMASAT-3 satellite. Observations from January 2007 to December 2015 comprising 3,764,728 occultations, which are uniformly spread over land and sea, have been used to study temperature changes mainly in the troposphere along with the solar cycle over 60°N–60°S geographic latitudes. It was a challenging task to identify the height at which the solar cycle signal could be observed in temperature perturbations as different atmospheric processes contribute towards temperature variability. Using a high spatial resolution dataset from COSMIC we are able to detect solar cycle signal in the zonal mean temperature profiles near surface at 2 km and upward. A consistent rise in the interannual variation of temperature was observed along with the solar cycle. The change in the temperature structure showed a latitudinal variation from southern to northern hemisphere over the period 2007–2015 with a significant positive influence of sunspot numbers in the solar cycle. It can be concluded that the solar cycle induces changes in temperature by as much as 1.5°C. However, solar cycle signal in the stratospheric region could not be identified as the region is dominated by large-scale dynamical motions like quasi-biennial oscillation which suppress the influence of solar signal on temperature perturbations due to its quasi-periodic nature.

Keywords

Radio Occultation, Solar Cycle, Sunspot Number, Tropospheric Temperature.
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  • Detection of Solar Cycle Signal in the Tropospheric Temperature using COSMIC Data

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Authors

V. Kumar
Radio and Atmospheric Physics Lab, Rajdhani College, University of Delhi, Delhi 110 015, India
S. K. Dhaka
Radio and Atmospheric Physics Lab, Rajdhani College, University of Delhi, Delhi 110 015, India
V. Panwar
Radio and Atmospheric Physics Lab, Rajdhani College, University of Delhi, Delhi 110 015, India
Narendra Singh
Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), Nainital 263 002, India
A. S. Rao
Department of Applied Physics, Delhi Technical University, Delhi 110 042, India
Shristy Malik
Department of Applied Physics, Delhi Technical University, Delhi 110 042, India
S. Yoden
Department of Geophysics, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606850, India

Abstract


Influence of the solar cycle on temperature structure is examined using radio occultation measurements by COSMIC/FORMASAT-3 satellite. Observations from January 2007 to December 2015 comprising 3,764,728 occultations, which are uniformly spread over land and sea, have been used to study temperature changes mainly in the troposphere along with the solar cycle over 60°N–60°S geographic latitudes. It was a challenging task to identify the height at which the solar cycle signal could be observed in temperature perturbations as different atmospheric processes contribute towards temperature variability. Using a high spatial resolution dataset from COSMIC we are able to detect solar cycle signal in the zonal mean temperature profiles near surface at 2 km and upward. A consistent rise in the interannual variation of temperature was observed along with the solar cycle. The change in the temperature structure showed a latitudinal variation from southern to northern hemisphere over the period 2007–2015 with a significant positive influence of sunspot numbers in the solar cycle. It can be concluded that the solar cycle induces changes in temperature by as much as 1.5°C. However, solar cycle signal in the stratospheric region could not be identified as the region is dominated by large-scale dynamical motions like quasi-biennial oscillation which suppress the influence of solar signal on temperature perturbations due to its quasi-periodic nature.

Keywords


Radio Occultation, Solar Cycle, Sunspot Number, Tropospheric Temperature.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.18520/cs%2Fv115%2Fi12%2F2232-2239