Application
Due to its link to other kinds of solar activity, sunspot occurrence can be used to help predict space weather, the state of the ionosphere, and hence the conditions of short-wave radio propagation or satellite communications. Solar activity (and the sunspot cycle) are frequently discussed in the context of global warming; Jack Eddy noted the apparent correlation between the Maunder Minimum of sunspot occurrence and the Little Ice Age in European climate. Sunspots themselves, in terms of the magnitude of their radiant-energy deficit, have only a weak effect on the terrestrial climate in a direct sense. On longer time scales, such as the solar cycle, other magnetic phenomena (faculae and the chromospheric network) do correlate with sunspot occurrence. It is these other features that make the solar constant increase slightly at sunspot maxima, when naively one might expect that sunspots would make it decrease.
British economist William Stanley Jevons suggested in the 1870s that there is a relationship between sunspots and business cycle crises. Jevons reasoned that sunspots affect Earth's weather, which, in turn, influences crops and, therefore, the economy.
Read more about this topic: Sunspot
Famous quotes containing the word application:
“I conceive that the leading characteristic of the nineteenth century has been the rapid growth of the scientific spirit, the consequent application of scientific methods of investigation to all the problems with which the human mind is occupied, and the correlative rejection of traditional beliefs which have proved their incompetence to bear such investigation.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
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—Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)
“The application requisite to the duties of the office I hold [governor of Virginia] is so excessive, and the execution of them after all so imperfect, that I have determined to retire from it at the close of the present campaign.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)