The public is keenly interested in the Sun and its doings. “Sunspots” is one of the most frequent search terms bringing visitors to the NCAR/UCAR website.

If you’re a gardener in New England, you might remember the wet, cool summer of 2009 for its tomatoes and potatoes, ravaged by the earliest and most widespread “late blight” on record. If you’re from south Texas, you were probably just trying to keep green things alive.

Challenging conventional wisdom, new research finds that the number of sunspots provides an incomplete measure of changes in the Sun's impact on Earth over the course of the 11-year solar cycle.