Long-Period Solar Variability

Terrestrial climate records and historical observations of the Sun suggest that the Sun undergoes aperiodic oscillations in radiative output and size over time periods of centuries and millenia. Such behavior can be explained by the solar convective zone acting as a nonlinear oscillator, forced at the sunspot-cycle frequency by variations in heliomagnetic field strength. A forced variant of the Lorenz equations can generate a time series with the same characteristics as the solar and climate records. The timescales and magnitudes of oscillations that could be caused by this mechanism are consistent with what is known about the Sun and terrestrial climate