The UK and continental¹ Europe could be gripped by more frequent cold winters in the future as a result of low solar activity, say researchers.

研究人员称，受太阳活动极小期的影响，英国与欧洲大陆未来将会频繁出现严冬气候。

A period of low solar activity could lead to more cold winters in the UK

They identified a link between fewer sunspots and atmospheric² conditions（通风条件，大气条件） that "block" warm, westerly winds reaching Europe during winter months.

But they added that the phenomenon only affected³ a limited region and would not alter the overall global warming trend.

The findings appear in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

"By recent standards, we have just had what could be called a very cold winter and I wanted to see if this was just another coincidence or statistically⁴ robust⁵（强健的，粗野的） ," said lead author Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics at the University of Reading, UK.

To examine whether there was a link, Professor Lockwood and his co-authors compared past levels of solar activity with the Central England Temperature (CET) record, which is the world's longest continuous（连续的，持续的） instrumental record of such data.

The researchers used the 351-year CET record because it provided data that went back to the beginning of the Maunder Minimum, a prolonged（延长的，拖延的） period of very low activity on the Sun that lasted about half a century.

The Maunder Minimum occurred in the latter half of the 17th Century - a period when Europe experienced a series of harsh winters, which has been dubbed⁶（被成为） by some as the Little Ice Age. Following this, there was a gradual increase in solar activity that lasted 300 years.

Professor Lockwood explained that studies of activity on the Sun, which provides data stretching back（回溯到） over 9,000 years, showed that it tended to "ramp⁷ up（倾斜升温） quite slowly over about a 300-year period, then drop quite quickly over about a 100-year period".

He said the present decline started in 1985 and was currently about "half way back to a Maunder Minimum condition".

This allowed the team to compare recent years with what happened in the late 1600s.

"We found that you could accommodate（供应，调解） both the Maunder Minimum and the last few years into the same framework," he told BBC News.