A Reliable and Accurate Long-term Climate Record: Solar Irradiance

Abstract:

Solar irradiance – both total irradiance and spectral irradiance— are primary climate data variables. Because of absorption and scattering by our intervening atmosphere accurate measurements of the Sun are only realized from space observations beginning in about 1978. The long-term accuracies of the resulting data sets are limited by unidentified and uncertain on-orbit instrument degradation. Nevertheless, from numerous observing programs solar variability has been well established for short and intermediate times scales, with additional clear indications of decadal variability associated with the 11-year solar cycle.

How can today’s solar irradiance measurements be reliably compared with those made in the future, and how will the resulting comparison stand the test of time? There is one technique that shows great promise. The Sun is a star — more or less variable like any and all other stars. Stellar astronomers have a technique of establishing a star’s variability with precision of 0.01%, and over arbitrarily long periods of time. From the ground and from space they have success by simply comparing the irradiance of a target star to that of a number of standard stars. (The key here is that there exist many standard stars, and outliers are easily identified and removed from the ensemble.) For stellar comparisons it is straightforward to use a single instrument — same optics and detectors — to observe stars differing by several orders of magnitude in brightness. To observe the Sun and stars with a single instrument is far more problematic as there are easily eight to twelve orders of magnitude differences in brightness.

The SOLSTICE (Solar Stellar Irradiance Comparison Experiment) has now been flown twice — on UARS from 1991 to 2005 and on SORCE from 2003 to the present. The SOLSTICE is an ultraviolet spectral instrument measuring irradiance from 115 nm to 300 nm, and it is intentionally designed to observe both the Sun and selected standard stars. In addition to accommodating more than eight orders of magnitude dynamic range, the SOLSTICE optical design and data analyses must account for subtle differences in the solar and stellar observations. This paper will consider the success and limitations of the SOLSTICE UV irradiance data record.