| Summary: | With the advent of Earth-orbiting satellites to monitor our planet and spacecraft that study the sun, an active international joint project to monitor the Sun?Earth (Solar Terrestrial) environment has evolved. Coupled with an ever increasing computational capability, we are now able to study the many factors which influence the weather (the day-to-day variations in temperature, precipitation, and storm activity) and climate (seasonal and annual patterns of weather) that characterize the New England Region. In addition to recorded data and observations from space, recent advances in the study of ice core data, tree rings, lake and bog sediments, and other forms of proxy data now allow us to understand how our global and regional climates have changed in the past. In this chapter, we discuss some of those factors which are known to have affected the New England climate in the past, so that we can better understand potential consequences of future climate variability and change. First, we discuss solar factors which operate on time scales from days to millennia and consequences of these variations in New England. In many cases the magnitude of solar radiative forcing variations is small, but a number of mechanisms including changes in greenhouse gas concentrations may amplify the effects of solar variations on the Earth's climate. Variations in volcanic activity and distribution of aerosols can also affect global and regional climate and are discussed here, along with a brief consideration of the impact of changing land cover types. Finally we consider the recent rate of greenhouse gas increases due to human activity, and the possible consequences of altered atmospheric patterns such as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) on climate in the New England Region.
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