Thanks to Ian Wilson for introducing us to his new paper, which is part three of the planned four-part series. The paper can be downloaded from The General Science Journal here. Abstract below.
Abstract
The best way to study the changes in the climate “forcings” that impact the Earth’s mean atmospheric temperature is to look at the first difference of the time series of the world-mean temperature, rather than the time series itself.
Therefore, if the Perigean New/Full Moon cycles were to act as a forcing upon the Earth’s atmospheric temperature, you would expect to see the natural periodicities of this tidal forcing clearly imprinted upon the time rate of change of the world’s mean temperature.
Using both the adopted mean orbital periods of the Moon, as well as calculated algorithms based upon published ephemerides, this paper shows that the Perigean New/Full moon tidal cycles exhibit two dominant periodicities on decadal time scales.
The first is 10.1469 years, which is half of the 20.2937-year Perigean New/Full moon cycle. This represents the time required for the resynchronization of the phases of the Moon with the epochs when the perigee of the lunar orbit points directly towards or directly away from the Sun.
The second is 9.0554 years, which closely matches the 9.0713-year Lunar Tidal Cycle (LTC). This is the harmonic mean of the prograde 8.8475-year Lunar Anomalistic Cycle (LAC) and half of the retrograde 18.6134-year Lunar Nodal Cycle (LNC).
Hence, if the Perigean New/Full moon tidal cycle were to act as a “forcing” on the world’s mean temperatures, you would expect to see periodicities in the first difference of the world’s mean temperature anomaly (WMTA) data that were a simple sinusoidal superposition of the two dominant periods associated with the Equinox(/Solstice) spring tidal cycles (i.e. 9.1 and 10.1469 tropical years).
This paper makes a comparison between two times series that describe these phenomena. The first time series represents the lunar tidal forcing (LTF) curve. This curve is a superposition of a sine wave of amplitude 1.0 unit and period 9.1 tropical years, with a sine wave of amplitude 2.0 units and a period 10.1469 (= 9 FMC’s) tropical years, that is specifically aligned to match the phase of the Perigean New/Full moon cycle.
The second time series represents the difference curve for the HadCRUT4 monthly (Land + Sea) world mean temperature anomaly (DSTA), from 1850 to 2017.
A comparison between the LTF and DSTA curves shows that that the timing of the peaks in the LTF curve closely match those seen in the DSTA curve for two 45-year periods. The first going from 1865 to 1910 and the second from 1955 to 2000. During these two epochs, the aligned peaks of the LTF and the DSTA curves are separated from adjacent peaks by roughly the 9.6 years, which is close to the mean of 9.1 and 10.1469 years.
In addition, the comparison shows that there is a 45-year period separating the first two epochs (i.e. from 1910 to 1955), and a period after the year 2000, where the close match between the timing of the peaks in LTF and DSTA curves breaks down, with the DSTA peaks becoming separated from their neighbouring peaks by approximately 20 years.
Hence, the variations in the rate of change of the smoothed HadCRUT4 temperature anomalies closely follow a “forcing” curve that is formed by the simple sum of two sinusoids, one with a 9.1-year period which matches that of the lunar tidal cycle, and the other with a period of 10.1469-years that matches that of half the Perigean New/Full moon cycle.
This is precisely what you would expect if the natural periodicities associated with the Perigean New/Full moon tidal cycles were driving the observed variations in the world mean temperature (about the long-term linear trend) on decadal time scales.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
September 28, 2019 at 09:07AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 