Further analysis strengthens the conclusion of Currie (1974) that a solar cycle signal in surface air temperature does exist in North America. New findings are as follows: Geographically the distribution displays a highly coherent pattern. From a total 100 records the signal is detected or marginally detected at 55 locations. The northeast quadrant of the continent bounded by latitude 35¿ N and a trend line drawn northwest from (35¿ N, 105¿ W) parallel to the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountain contains 54 records and the signal is evidenced at 51 of these stations. The respective mean and standard deviation of amplitude and period are 0.29¿0.15¿ C and 10.7¿0.4 yrs. A significant portion of the variance is due to a latitude gradient of 0.20¿0.05¿ C/103 km. The temperature records also show some evidence for a small 0.06¿ C signal at the 18.6 yr lunar-nodal period. By increasing the bandwidth an order of magnitude, the findings buttress recent work on historical observations (Eddy, 1977) and climate modeling (Schneider and Mass, 1975) which indicate a coherent relation between events on the sun as reflected in solar activity and excursions in earth climate on time scale of order 102 yr. |