Solar Weather Technique

Piers Corbyn: "Yes, it is more powerful and reliable than traditional methods. Traditional forecasts can only go up to ten days ahead for any meaningful forecast whereas the Solar Weather Technique can give detailed forecasts of extreme weather many months ahead. It is proven to be especially accurate for cold snaps and storms. Traditional forecasters believe that the Earth’s weather is primarily controlled by weather in the past, which is not true; there are external influences that come from the Sun, and are predictable."

FS: "Why does no one else use your method?"

PC: "Because it’s a secret! We’ve explained the general idea of how the technique works using predictable aspects of influence of solar activity on weather but not how to calculate them. We have studied hundreds of years of weather activity and corresponding solar activity such as solar flares and sunspots and have made our calculations. We attribute confidence levels to our forecasts and when these are high, as they often are for extreme events such as major storms, we are accurate over 85% of the time. Independent assessments by the University of Sunderland agree our long range forecasts of storms and cold spells are statistically significant with the chance of them being down to luck being only one in a thousand."

FS: "What can you tell us about the ‘Solar Weather Technique’?"

PC: "The ‘Solar Weather Technique’ is a procedure using predictable links between solar activity and weather. Particles are ejected from the Sun and these particles generate the changes in solar wind (the rush of particles from the Sun) which allows us to predict changes in the weather. There are two parallel approaches; the first one generates Weather Action Indicators. These are theoretical parameters which describe the Sun-Earth magnetic/particle weather state. We use these to identify when some predicted future state occured in the past. We then look back at weather patterns over the last one hundred years with a time resolution of a few days and use these parameters to find which weather systems are likely to occur in the future as a result of predicted solar activity. The second parallel approach are general predictions and does not rely directly on specific time windows of past data. The two approaches are combined to produce the long range forecast."

SoHo The Solar wind flows from the sun at up to 900km/s - this stream of particles may control our weather.

FS: "How far in advance can you predict the weather?"

PC: "We issue detailed forecasts (with time resolutions of a few days) up to eleven months into the future in seasonal batches. We can issue forecasts for certain events up to two years into the future."