Williams College | 2016 Aug 29
When the Moon abruptly cuts off sunlight from Earth at a total solar eclipse, our weather reacts to the sudden darkness. A new issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, the oldest surviving scientific journal, deals with the effects of the March 20, 2015 eclipse. ...
The bulk of the theme issue was about the effect of the partial eclipse that was also visible from the U.K. The dimming of sunlight over the hour or so during the partial eclipse making its effects measurable. On Svalbard, for the total eclipse, the temperature and pressure automatic sensors found only slight effects, though a thermometer hanging from one of the camera tripods recorded a dip in temperature from the 8°F to which the morning temperature had risen down to –7° a few minutes after the center of totality.
Pasachoff and Peñaloza-Murillo, who is professor emeritus at the Universidad de los Andes in Mérida, Venezuela, have published a previous paper about the effect of a total eclipse on weather, and are planning further observations, again in collaboration with Roman, at the August 21, 2017, total solar eclipse that they will attempt to observe from Salem, Oregon. ...
Atmospheric Effects of Solar Eclipses Stimulated by the 2015 UK Eclipse - R. Giles Harrison, Edward Hanna, et al
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 374(2077) (28 Sep 2016)