Abstract
IN the year 1875 two articles by Mr. H. F. Blanford on the connection between solar heat and sun-spots appeared in the pages of NATURE (vol. xii. pp. 147 and 188), in which it was shown that Mr. Baxendell's conclusion that the sun's heat undergoes a periodical variation coinciding directly with that of the spots, appeared to be supported by the evidence of observations of the black-bulb thermometer taken at certain stations in Bengal and the neighbouring provinces. My attention has been recalled to the subject by the almost complete failure of the rainy monsoon this year in Upper India, and by the excessively high temperature ever since the middle of June, and I have been thereby led to attempt to discover whether any evidence in favour of Mr. Baxendell's conclusion, or against it, is to be obtained from the registers of meteorological stations in Upper India. I have therefore gone over the registers of certain stations in the North-West Provinces and Oudh, where solar radiation temperatures have been recorded since 1869, and at which not more than one change of instrument occurred in the interval 1869–1876. The inference I draw from these records is exactly the opposite of Mr. Blanford's. They do not afford any support to Mr. Baxendell's theory, but the energy of solar radiation appears from them to be most intense when the spots are fewest.
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HILL, S. Solar Radiation and Sun-Spots . Nature 16, 505–506 (1877). https://doi.org/10.1038/016505a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/016505a0