<a href=”http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/22/correlation-demonstrated-bewteen-cosmic-rays-and-temperature-of-the-stratosphere/-5254″>Watts Up With That? had a fascinating item yesterday on cosmic-ray data collected deep underground in a defunct iron mine in Soudan, Minnesota. The research team, comprised of scientists from the National Centre for Atmospheric Science and the Science and Technology Facilities Council in the U.K., and from the DoE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, think they’ve found evidence of a relationship between stratospheric weather events and cosmic rays. And it wasn’t even what they were looking for (which suggests to me that we don’t have to worry about falsified data):

What they observed was a strikingly close relationship between the cosmic-rays and stratospheric temperature — this they could understand: the cosmic-rays, known as muons are produced following the decay of other cosmic rays, known as mesons. Increasing the temperature of the atmosphere expands the atmosphere so that fewer mesons are destroyed on impact with air, leaving more to decay naturally to muons. Consequently, if temperature increases so does the number of muons detected.
What did surprise the scientists, however, were the intermittent and sudden increases observed in the levels of muons during the winter months. These jumps in the data occurred over just a few days. On investigation, they found these changes coincided with very sudden increases in the temperature of the stratosphere (by up to 40 C in places!). Looking more closely at supporting meteorological data, they realised they were observing a major weather event, known as a Sudden Stratospheric Warming. On average, these occur every other year and are notoriously unpredictable. This study has shown, for the first time, that cosmic-ray data can be used effectively to identify these events. . . .
Interestingly, the muon cosmic-ray dataset used in this study was collected as a by-product of the MINOS experiment, which is designed to investigate properties of neutrinos, but which also measures muons originating high up in the atmosphere, as background noise in the detector. Having access to these data has led to the production of a valuable dataset of benefit to climate researchers.
Professor Jenny Thomas, deputy spokesperson for MINOS from University College London said “The question we set out to answer at MINOS is to do with the basic properties of fundamental particles called neutrinos which is a crucial ingredient in our current model of the Universe, but as is often the way, by keeping an open mind about the data collected, the science team has been able to find another, unanticipated benefit that aids our understanding of weather and climate phenomena.”

Their findings have been published in Geophysical Research Letters. I’m curious to find out what Henrik Svensmark thinks about it.

In any case, check out <a href=”http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/22/correlation-demonstrated-bewteen-cosmic-rays-and-temperature-of-the-stratosphere/-5254″>Watts Up With That? for more of the story. Go for the video animation. Stay for the comments section.