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:
“I think that if most guys in America could somehow get their fave-rave poster girl in bed and have total license to do whatever they wanted with this legendary body for one afternoon, at least 75 percent of the guys in the country would elect to beat her up.”
—Lester Bangs (1948–1982)
“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)
“Our civilization has decided ... that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men.... When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“The poet is no tender slip of fairy stock, who requires peculiar institutions and edicts for his defense, but the toughest son of earth and of Heaven, and by his greater strength and endurance his fainting companions will recognize the God in him. It is the worshipers of beauty, after all, who have done the real pioneer work of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)