Solar Forcing of Drought Detected in Snowfall Records of the Central Sierra Nevada, Western United States

This paper presents wavelet analyses of snow water equivalent (SWE) data from three sites near to the
Lake Tahoe Basin (Lake Lucille, Ward Creek, and Mt. Rose) with continuous measurement records since 1910; and
a fourth site which is ~180 km to the south at Mammoth Pass with records back to 1928. The correlation amongst
the four stations is surprisingly high (0.88), which suggests SWE variation is regionally correlated and that each of
these sites experiences the same forcing function. When the International Sunspot Number (ISSN) data are modified
to account for magnetic polarity of the sunspots to reflect the reversal of the magnetic field of the sun every ~11
years, the modified ISSN series can be demodulated using suppressed carrier amplitude modulation methods and
correlated to the 100 year SWE series. Based on the results presented in this paper, we propose the major driving
forces of winter precipitation, in the form of snow, in the northern and central Sierra are the reversal of the sun's
magnetic field and a statistically independent "carrier" signal being generated by the Earth's atmospheric circulation
parameters including orbital (inclination, eccentricity, precession, obliquity, and rotational), depth of the
atmosphere, and heating by the sun. (KEYWORDS: snowpack, sunspots, solar magnetic reversal, rotational,
cosmic)