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The future of solar activity
Andrew Conway (Glasgow)
As activity on the Sun can have a profound effect on the Earth,
predicting the level of activity, as well as understanding its various
guises, is of more than just academic interest. So far there has been
some success, e.g. in predicting the sunspot number time series, which
is a good index of solar activity. However, this kind of prediction
only amounts to a statistical understanding of a time series in terms
of itself, and does not relate to physical understanding. This talk
reviews the usefulness and limitations of solar activity prediction to
date, and looks forward to future methods that combine statistics and
physics.
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