Application
Due to its link to other kinds of solar activity, sunspot occurrence can be used to help predict space weather, the state of the ionosphere, and hence the conditions of short-wave radio propagation or satellite communications. Solar activity (and the sunspot cycle) are frequently discussed in the context of global warming; Jack Eddy noted the apparent correlation between the Maunder Minimum of sunspot occurrence and the Little Ice Age in European climate. Sunspots themselves, in terms of the magnitude of their radiant-energy deficit, have only a weak effect on the terrestrial climate in a direct sense. On longer time scales, such as the solar cycle, other magnetic phenomena (faculae and the chromospheric network) do correlate with sunspot occurrence. It is these other features that make the solar constant increase slightly at sunspot maxima, when naively one might expect that sunspots would make it decrease.
British economist William Stanley Jevons suggested in the 1870s that there is a relationship between sunspots and business cycle crises. Jevons reasoned that sunspots affect Earth's weather, which, in turn, influences crops and, therefore, the economy.
Read more about this topic: Sunspot
Famous quotes containing the word application:
“My business is stanching blood and feeding fainting men; my post the open field between the bullet and the hospital. I sometimes discuss the application of a compress or a wisp of hay under a broken limb, but not the bearing and merits of a political movement. I make gruel—not speeches; I write letters home for wounded soldiers, not political addresses.”
—Clara Barton (1821–1912)
“We will not be imposed upon by this vast application of forces. We believe that most things will have to be accomplished still by the application called Industry. We are rather pleased, after all, to consider the small private, but both constant and accumulated, force which stands behind every spade in the field. This it is that makes the valleys shine, and the deserts really bloom.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man ... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)