by Willy Eschenbach, March 30, 2018 in WUWT

People have asked about the tools that I use to look for any signature of sunspot-related solar variations in climate datasets. They’ve wondered whether these tools are up to the task. What I use are periodograms and Complete Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (CEEMD). Periodograms show how much strength there is at various cycle lengths (periods) in a given signal. CEEMD decomposes a signal into underlying simpler signals.

Now, a lot of folks seem to think that they can determine whether a climate dataset is related to the sunspot cycle simply by looking at a graph. So, here’s a test of that ability. Below is recent sunspot data, along with four datasets A, B, C, and D. The question is, which of the four datasets (if any) is affected by sunspots?