Sunspot Periodicity
First published: 2022
Brief summary
Reviews how the ~11-year Schwabe sunspot cycle is often uncritically applied across unrelated solar and terrestrial measures, and surveys the wider hierarchy of related cycles (Hallstatt ~2400 yr, Suess-deVries ~200 yr, Gleissberg ~88 yr, ~158 day) alongside a century of research linking sunspots to human health, economy and society.
Article
Sunspot Periodicity is a preprint published by arXiv in 2022. It reviews how the ~11-year Schwabe sunspot cycle is often uncritically applied across unrelated solar and terrestrial measures, and surveys the wider hierarchy of related cycles (Hallstatt ~2400 yr, Suess-deVries ~200 yr, Gleissberg ~88 yr, ~158 day) alongside a century of research linking sunspots to human health, economy and society.
The analysis focuses on ~11 yr (Schwabe), ~2400 yr (Hallstatt), ~200 yr (Suess-deVries), ~88 yr (Gleissberg), ~158 days. It also considers explicitly interdisciplinary, citing solar-health-economy-society research from Herschel (1801) and Jevons (1878) through to 2017. This gives the cycle claim a specific numerical and evidential setting rather than presenting periodicity only as a visual impression.
The article reports the following result: Although not readily grasped without telescopic projection, the repetitive nature of sunspots attracted the interest of a wide range of astronomical, meteorological, medical and other researchers seeking to investigate solar influences on human health, economy and society. The interpretation is strongest when the same cycle definition and statistical standard can be applied consistently across the different fields being compared.
For cycles researchers, the article brings together sunspot periodicity, schwabe cycle, hallstatt cycle, solar-terrestrial effects. It is relevant to comparative cycles research because it links periodic behaviour across disciplines and encourages common methods for testing recurrence, phase and causation.
Because it is a preprint, the work should be read alongside later peer-reviewed publications and independent replications. It remains useful because the proposed cycle, dataset and analytical approach are stated clearly enough to be scrutinised.
Source details and credits
- Source / publisher: arXiv
- Source type: Preprint
- URL type: PDF
- Credits: arXiv
- URL: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.03249