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Register a new userTowards a long-term record of solar total and spectral irradiance
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The variation of total solar irradiance (TSI) has been measured since 1978 and that of the spectral irradiance for an even shorter amount of time. Semi-empirical models are now available that reproduce over 80% of the measured irradiance variations. An extension of these models into the more distant past is needed in order to serve as input to climate simulations. Here we review our most recent efforts to model solar total and spectral irradiance on time scales from days to centuries and even longer. Solar spectral irradiance has been reconstructed since 1947. Reconstruction of solar total irradiance goes back to 1610 and suggests a value of about 1-1.5 Wm$^{-2}$ for the increase in the cycle-averaged TSI since the end of the Maunder minimum, which is significantly lower than previously assumed but agrees with other modern models. First steps have also been made towards reconstructions of solar total and spectral irradiance on time scales of millennia.
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Changes in solar irradiance and in its spectral distribution are among the main natural drivers of the climate on Earth. However, irradiance measurements are only available for less than four decades, while assessment of solar influence on Earth requires much longer records. The aim of this work is to provide the most up-to-date physics-based reconstruction of the solar total and spectral irradiance (TSI/SSI) over the last nine millennia. The concentrations of the cosmogenic isotopes 14C and 10Be in natural archives have been converted to decadally averaged sunspot numbers through a chain of physics-based models. TSI and SSI are reconstructed with an updated SATIRE model. Reconstructions are carried out for each isotope record separately, as well as for their composite. We present the first ever SSI reconstruction over the last 9000 years from the individual 14C and 10Be records as well as from their newest composite. The reconstruction employs physics-based models to describe the involved processes at each step of the procedure. Irradiance reconstructions based on two different cosmogenic isotope records, those of 14C and 10Be, agree well with each other in their long-term trends despite their different geochemical paths in the atmosphere of Earth. Over the last 9000 years, the reconstructed secular variability in TSI is of the order of 0.11%, or 1.5 W/m2. After the Maunder minimum, the reconstruction from the cosmogenic isotopes is consistent with that from the direct sunspot number observation. Furthermore, over the nineteenth century, the agreement of irradiance reconstructions using isotope records with the reconstruction from the sunspot number by Chatzistergos et al. (2017) is better than that with the reconstruction from the WDC-SILSO series (Clette et al. 2014), with a lower chi-square-value.
Many observational records critically rely on our ability to merge different (and not necessarily overlapping) observations into a single composite. We provide a novel and fully-traceable approach for doing so, which relies on a multi-scale maximum likelihood estimator. This approach overcomes the problem of data gaps in a natural way and uses data-driven estimates of the uncertainties. We apply it to the total solar irradiance (TSI) composite, which is currently being revised and is critical to our understanding of solar radiative forcing. While the final composite is pending decisions on what corrections to apply to the original observations, we find that the new composite is in closest agreement with the PMOD composite and the NRLTSI2 model. In addition, we evaluate long-term uncertainties in the TSI, which reveal a 1/f scaling
The Earths primary source of energy is the radiant energy generated by the Sun, which is referred to as solar irradiance, or total solar irradiance (TSI) when all of the radiation is measured. A minor change in the solar irradiance can have a significant impact on the Earths climate and atmosphere. As a result, studying and measuring solar irradiance is crucial in understanding climate changes and solar variability. Several methods have been developed to reconstruct total solar irradiance for long and short periods of time; however, they are physics-based and rely on the availability of data, which does not go beyond 9,000 years. In this paper we propose a new method, called TSInet, to reconstruct total solar irradiance by deep learning for short and long periods of time that span beyond the physical models data availability. On the data that are available, our method agrees well with the state-of-the-art physics-based reconstruction models. To our knowledge, this is the first time that deep learning has been used to reconstruct total solar irradiance for more than 9,000 years.
We address the importance of historical full disc Ca II K spectroheliograms for solar activity and irradiance reconstruction studies. We review our work on processing such data to enable them to be used in irradiance reconstructions. We also present our preliminary estimates of the plage areas from five of the longest available historical Ca II K archives.
Reliable historical records of total solar irradiance (TSI) are needed for climate change attribution and research to assess the extent to which long-term variations in the Suns radiant energy incident on the Earth may exacerbate (or mitigate) the more dominant warming in recent centuries due to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases. We investigate potential impacts of the new Sunspot Index and Long-term Solar Observations (SILSO) sunspot-number time series on model reconstructions of TSI. In contemporary TSI records, variations on time scales longer than about a day are dominated by the opposing effects of sunspot darkening and facular brightening. These two surface magnetic features, retrieved either from direct observations or from solar activity proxies, are combined in TSI models to reproduce the current TSI observational record. Indices that manifest solar-surface magnetic activity, in particular the sunspot-number record, then enable the reconstruction of historical TSI. Revisions to the sunspot-number record therefore affect the magnitude and temporal structure of TSI variability on centennial time scales according to the model reconstruction methodologies. We estimate the effects of the new SILSO record on two widely used TSI reconstructions, namely the NRLTSI2 and the SATIRE models. We find that the SILSO record has little effect on either model after 1885 but leads to greater amplitude solar-cycle fluctuations in TSI reconstructions prior, suggesting many 18th and 19th century cycles could be similar in amplitude to those of the current Modern Maximum. TSI records based on the revised sunspot data do not suggest a significant change in Maunder Minimum TSI values, and comparing that era to the present we find only very small potential differences in estimated solar contributions to climate with this new sunspot record.
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