It was well said in the Planetary effects on sunspot cycle thread by Rtomes


Quote:
Originally Posted by orionjim View Post
I’m not sure if you gave the three proposals (tidal, COM and Jupiter’s moons) to be a statement of mainstream thinking.
No. I gave them as background to the idea that the planets have effects on the sun. There is ample evidence from studying the frequencies found in sunspot numbers that they relate to planetary periods. However no mechanism has been generally accepted as explaining everything.
Quote:
From what I have read from the current experts on sunspots none of the three proposals you mentioned are ever talked about. I think today’s main expert on Sunspots is NASA’s Dr. David Hathaway and I have never read or heard him speak about planet alignment relative to sunspots. He sees the sun as a dynamo that among other things produces sunspots.
We need to distinguish between mainstream and logical. Seriously.

Any person who depends on getting their income from their scientific work is never going to look seriously at planetary alignments and sunspots. Why? Because it sounds like astrology. Most people will run a mile before they get associated with that. The main reason that serious papers were published in the 1960s was that NASA needed to be sure that they were not sending astronauts to the moon to get fried by solar flares. So some serious effort went in and as I understand it the only thing that they found that was useful was planetary alignments. (end of other thread copy paste)

international geophysical year was the last year that any funding was approved for studies of lunar effects on the weather. Before calculators were invented, let alone computers. At the end of WWII there was an excess of pilots in the service, so they put them to use looking to see if Ben Franklin was right or wrong.

They flew in large grid patterns, looking for Static charges in the clouds and the atmosphere. What they found was what any electrical engineer should know, was there were no electrical fields that did not have associated magnetic fields. Although they did find there were huge wandering magnetically coupled electrical fields, they did not have the ability to plot them on paper effectively enough to form any decision other than...There were no static fields found, end of study...

After an exhausting push to look for lunar phase signals in the atmospheric circulation patterns, at about the same time, funding was stopped if the word moon or lunar appeared in the proposal.

Of all the OCEAN tidal periods the declinational component is the weakest one to the point that it is not detectable above the noise. after a couple of studies, they jumped to the wrong conclusion that the dynamics of the ocean also applied to the atmosphere, although one was bounded and the other is not.

I am the first person to look into Lunar declinational tides using weather data and a computer. There is now some 20+ years of global weather satellite photos archived hourly for most of the period, that could be animated into a sequenced movie to show the four fold (109.3 day) pattern of the lunar declinational tidal forcing of the periodicity of the movement of the Rossby waves and jet streams.

All of the funding I have had at my disposal has come out of my normal work income, no one else, personal or government body, has contributed financially to the production of this study in any way. Some of the early data base I was allowed to sample for free, by copying the local stations stored data, in the late 80's I started buying data from NOAA out of my own pocket. Computer, software, printer supplies, all out of my own pocket from my hourly wages as a Machinist.

I got to spend many hours in the Linda Hall Research Library, at UMKC reading the "Synopsis of Meteorological, and Geophysical Abstracts" of research done from 1950 thru 1982, copying any I found reverent, before I moved out into central Kansas, and have relied on searches via the Internet, and a couple of visits to universities on vacations since.

NCAR in Boulder twice, M.I.T.'s building 54 once, (where I ironically found the 54 and 109 day patterns in their photo archive workroom), I tried to show them to Peter Stone the head of their program, but he was headed out to be a keynote speaker in Madrid, at the time, and had only an hour for me to see him.

When I lived in Kansas City, I used to get to visit with Paul Schaffer, who was the head of their training program about my ideas, he is now in charge of the Severe Storms Labs in Normal Oklahoma, and appears to be unreachable by the "general public", that I am.