Sunlight - Total (TSI) and Spectral Solar Irradiance (SSI) Upon Earth

Total (TSI) and Spectral Solar Irradiance (SSI) Upon Earth

Total Solar Irradiance upon Earth (TSI) was earlier measured by satellite to be roughly 1.366 kilowatts per square meter (kW/m²), but most recently NASA cites TSI as "1361 W/m² as compared to ~1366 W/m² from earlier observations ", based on regular readings from NASA's Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment(SORCE) satellite, active since 2003, noting that this "discovery is critical in examining the energy budget of the planet Earth and isolating the climate change due to human activities." Furthermore the Spectral Irradiance Monitor (SIM) has found in the same period that spectral solar irradiance (SSI) at UV (ultraviolet) wavelength corresponds in a less clear, and probably more complicated fashion, with earth's climate responses than earlier assumed, fueling broad avenues of new research in "the connection of the Sun and stratosphere, troposphere, biosphere, ocean, and Earth’s climate".

Read more about this topic:  Sunlight

Famous quotes containing the words total, spectral, solar and/or earth:

    The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.
    John Steinbeck (1902–1968)

    How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?
    Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)

    Senta: These boats, sir, what are they for?
    Hamar: They are solar boats for Pharaoh to use after his death. They’re the means by which Pharaoh will journey across the skies with the sun, with the god Horus. Each day they will sail from east to west, and each night Pharaoh will return to the east by the river which runs underneath the earth.
    William Faulkner (1897–1962)

    The earth had a single light afar,
    A flickering, human pathetic light,
    That was maintained against the night,
    It seemed to me, by the people there,
    With a Godforsaken brute despair.
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)