In article ,
Martin Brown writes:
I am sceptical too but here is one source with references:
http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/...ap10/moon.html
I looked at the notes but not the references. They refer to single
locations and limited periods of time, which makes me wonder about
statistical significance. In any case, they can't tell us anything
global.
There is a more recent climate related paper claiming a statistically
significant temperature to lunar phase correlation in satellite data but
not rainfall.
http://science.sciencemag.org/conten.../1481.abstract
It isn't totally implausible since the Earth will be very slightly
closer to the sun at full moon. The effect is tiny ~20mK
I think Martin has nailed the cause, though the authors didn't. While
the authors write "0.02 K" and "0.03 K" in the text -- and why they
give two different values is unclear to me -- their Figure 1 (which I
found in the pdf but not the html version) actually shows 10 mK
difference. That's just the amount I estimate from the difference in
solar distance as a function of lunar phase. I'm impressed that it
can actually be measured.
Another source quoted
http://www.reportingclimatescience.c...-rainfall.html
which is based on the refereed article at
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...5GL067342/full
This shows the expected semi-diurnal tidal effect on the atmosphere
and correlates it with a tiny rainfall effect. The original claim
was a monthly effect, which this paper doesn't address and about
which I remain skeptical.
By the way, it's not hard to compare the relative tidal forces on a
raindrop from the Moon and from a nearby frog. The Moon is roughly
three times denser than a frog, so if the Moon and the frog subtend
the same angular diameter as seen from the raindrop, the Moon's tidal
force will be three times larger. Move the frog 30% closer, and the
tidal forces will be equal. (Tidal force goes as r^-1/3.) Of course
both are utterly negligible for any practical purpose.
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