Quote:
Originally Posted by crowsnest
Can we get the short version   |
That was intended as a layman's tutorial on "how to understand the way we forecast seasons."
It IS the short version (you should see how complicated it gets...) But it can be further shortened to say this:
Imagine the earth and all of its systems as a giant, Swiss-made clock that we haven't completely figured out yet. In it, there are many, many gears. Each one is a separate cycle or process to which we humans have assigned a complicated-sounding name. And we continue discovering more cycles. Some are longer ("big gears") while others are shorter ("small gears.")
...and the forecast for this winter? I wouldn't hold out much hope for cold, based on the solar cycle. The sun's been on the "heat-up" side of its current cycle (due to peak next year) for the last couple of years, after being unusually dead for the first part of the cycle. The current solar cycle was like a car with an old battery starting on a really cold morning and it finally got going.
The sun is one of the big gears in the cycle, being the reason for all weather and life on earth. Smaller gears could throw that forecast off -- especially here in New England where localized patterns are often the reasons for the weather we get -- but generally the more energy the big space fire puts out, the more energy its nearby orbiting planets receive from it.