Towards better solar storm reconstructions: assessing the reliability of cosmogenic radionuclide records using a state-of-the-art aerosol-climate model

The super solar storms can damage our critical infrastructure, such as power supply and communication systems, resulting in catastrophic impacts on our model society.

To well prepare for those extreme solar storms in the future, we need to have a solid understanding of such solar storms in the past.

Cosmogenic radionuclides (e.g.,10Be and 36Cl) from the natural archives (e.g., ice cores) are powerful tools to trace past super solar storms. They have found three extreme solar storms that exceeding the known one by about one order of magnitude.

However, other influences on the 10Be and 36Cl in ice cores, such as volcanic eruption and climate, can complicate our interpretation of the solar signals in the data, leading to large uncertainty in reconstructing the extreme solar storms.

The proposed research aims to significantly improve our ability to use those radionuclides for ancient solar storms via improving the understanding of climate and volcanic influences on 10Be and 36Cl.

The model simulation of 10Be and 36Cl over recent time can provide an in-depth understanding of the possible disturbances on the solar storm signals in ice core data.

The model sensitivity test can also help us evaluate the potential of this proxy method to document extreme solar storms.

Finally, those results will lead to improved constraints of the extreme solar storms, thus better assessing the risks in connection with solar storms and better preparing for such possibly devastating events.