On the Relation between Solar Activity and Clear-Sky Terrestrial Irradiance

The Mauna Loa Observatory record of direct-beam solar irradiance measurements for the years 1958-2010 is analysed to investigate the variation of clear-sky terrestrial insolation with solar activity over more than four solar cycles. The raw irradiance data exhibit a marked seasonal cycle, extended periods of lower irradiance due to emissions of volcanic aerosols, and a long-term decrease in atmospheric transmission independent of solar activity. After correcting for these effects, it is found that clear-sky terrestrial irradiance typically varies by about 0.2 +/- 0.1% over the course of the solar cycle, a change of the same order of magnitude as the variations of the total solar irradiance above the atmosphere. An investigation of changes in the clear-sky atmospheric transmission fails to find a significant trend with sunspot number. Hence there is no evidence for a yet unknown effect amplifying variations of clear-sky irradiance with solar activity.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, in press at Solar Physics; minor changes to the text to match final published versio

(S,N)-implications on bounded lattices

Since the birth of the fuzzy sets theory several extensions have been proposed. For these extensions, different sets of membership functions were considered. Since fuzzy connectives, such as conjunctions, negations and implications, play an important role in the theory and applications of fuzzy logics, these connectives have also been extended. An extension of fuzzy logic, which generalizes the ones considered up to the present, was proposed by Joseph Goguen in 1967. In this extension, the membership values are drawn from arbitrary bounded lattices. The simplest and best studied class of fuzzy implications is the class of (S,N)-implications, and in this chapter we provide an extension of (S,N)-implications in the context of bounded lattice valued fuzzy logic, and we show that several properties of this class are preserved in this more general framework