Total (TSI) and Spectral Solar Irradiance (SSI) Upon Earth
Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) – the amount of solar radiation received at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere – was earlier measured by satellite to be roughly 1.366 kilowatts per square meter (kW/m²), but most recently NASA cites TSI as 1,361 W/m² as compared to ~1,366 W/m² from earlier observations, based on results from a series of NASA and ESA satellite TSI monitors continuing today with the ACRIMSAT/ACRIM3, SOHO/VIRGO and SORCE/TIM observations. This “discovery is critical in examining the energy budget of the planet Earth and isolating the climate change due to human activities.” Furthermore the SORCE 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: Sunshiny
Famous quotes containing the words total, spectral, solar and/or earth:
“You need an infinite stretch of time ahead of you to start to think, infinite energy to make the smallest decision. The world is getting denser. The immense number of useless projects is bewildering. Too many things have to be put in to balance up an uncertain scale. You can’t disappear anymore. You die in a state of total indecision.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“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)
“Lincoln becomes the American solar myth, the chief butt of American credulity and sentimentality.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be written, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)