  The Sun provides the energy required to sustain life on Earth and drive our
planet's atmospheric circulation. However, establishing a solid physical
connection between solar and tropospheric variability has posed a considerable
challenge across the spectrum of Earth-system science. The canon of solar
variability, the solar fiducial clock, lies almost exclusively with the 400
years of human telescopic observations that demonstrates the waxing and waning
number of sunspots, over an 11(ish) year period. Recent research has
demonstrated the critical importance of the underlying 22-year magnetic
polarity cycle in establishing the shorter sunspot cycle. Integral to the
manifestation of the latter is the spatio-temporal overlapping and migration of
oppositely polarized magnetic bands. The points when these bands emerge at high
solar latitudes and cancel at the equator are separated by almost 20 years.
Here we demonstrate the impact of these "termination" points on the Sun's
radiative output and particulate shielding of our atmosphere through the
dramatically rapid reconfiguration of solar magnetism. These events reset the
Sun's fiducial clock and present a new portal to explore the Sun-Earth
connection. Using direct observation and proxies of solar activity going back
six decades we can, with high statistical significance, demonstrate an apparent
correlation between the solar cycle terminations and the largest swings of
Earth's oceanic indices---a previously overlooked correspondence. Forecasting
the Sun's global behavior places the next solar termination in early 2020;
should a major oceanic swing follow, our challenge becomes: when does
correlation become causation and how does the process work?
