New evidence for possible impact of solar activity on long-term fluctuation of the earth rotation

The long-term fluctuation of the Schwabe period (LSP) of sunspots number (SSN) has been found to have high correlation with the variation of the length-of-day (LOD) in low frequency by using the data of smoothed monthly mean SSN during 1818–1999 and the method of wavelet transform. Analyses indicate that the maximum correlation coefficient between the series of LSP and LOD during 1892–1997 is about 0.9, with a time lag of about 5 years for the LOD related to the LSP. Though the maximum correlation coefficients between the LSP and the other two LOD series (1818–1997) reduce to about 0.4, they remain over the thresholds of 95% confidence level. This suggests new evidence for possible impact of solar activity on the long-term fluctuation of the earth rotation.