Insider Blog: Sun’s activity during an eclipse can have weather, climate impacts
It was a spectacular sight, the sky going completely dark under clear skies for four minutes in southern Illinois.
The next total solar eclipse won't happen for more than 20 years, but data from the sun's activity today could give us insight into climate change in the future.
Dr. Cori Brevik is a scientist and professor of physics at SIU who has been planning for today's eclipse for two years. She told ABC 17 News that SIU had more than 80 telescopes along the path of totality.
“So we’re interested in what’s happening in the lower atmosphere of the sun. So when you stand on the ground and you look up, you can’t see it because the sun’s too bright. When you’re in space, we typically block that part out because it’s too near the sun so we don’t get to study it. An eclipse is the perfect time to see that part. So we’re interested in the eruptions and things happening in that lower atmosphere. It affects us because those eruptions send particles back down to the earth. It can affect our communication, our power grid. It can affect our climate, all sorts of things that everybody should be interested in.
We know that eclipses can change the weather in a very short amount of time by dropping temperatures, changing winds, and even creating or clearing clouds.
In Carbondale, we experienced about a 9 degree temperature drop with the winds picking up right before totality. Winds decreased as the sky went dark.
In Columbia, the drop was about 7 degrees, even with only 95% totality.
A team of students from Iowa State launched a weather balloon as part of a research grant to collect temperature, dew point, pressure, and wind information in the lower levels of the atmosphere during totality.
Dr. Brevik said the sun's behavior can predict climate trends down the line.
“It doesn’t affect your daily weather, people who say oh it’s hot today, that’s not why. But long term when there’s all this activity it dumps extra energy into the atmosphere. So if you go back a period of time when there were no sun spots for like 50 years, and all of a sudden the climate cooled. Lakes and rivers froze over that don’t normally, potato famine when all of a sudden agriculture becomes challenging because we’re not getting as much energy from the sun as we normally do.”
