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| Frank Vignola at a solar electric monitoring station |
During the 2005 Solar World Congress in Orlando, Frank Vignola and doctoral student Laura Riihimaki presented a first step toward testing and refining regional climate models for the Pacific Northwest that will help track global warming.
In sharp contrast to reports of increased global dimming, the researchers reported a 10 to 15 percent increase in solar radiation at sites in Burns, Hermiston and Eugene over the last 25 years, according to an initial analysis of data collected since 1979 by the university’s Solar Radiation Monitoring Laboratory.
“Oregon is a state famous for rain but in fact, Oregon is getting much more sunshine,” said Frank Vignola, the laboratory’s director and the study’s co-author. “In fact, about two-thirds of the Northwest gets as much or more solar radiation than Florida. The northwestern corner of Oregon, which includes the population center in Portland, gets about 20 percent less.”
The recent study also found that Oregon winters are becoming cloudier. However, solar radiation levels during December average 75 percent less than July, so sunnier summers more than offset the increase in winter cloud cover.
“Now that we’ve characterized the trend, we can use this data with regional climate models to tell us how global warming is affecting the region and improve our success at predicting climate change in the Northwest,” Riihimaki said.
Though monitoring is done globally, no other site has measured solar radiation continuously for such a long period. “We are working with the largest and highest quality continuous record in the world,” Vignola said.
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