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"It's not often in climate studies that you make a quantum leap in measurement capability, but the tenfold improvement in accuracy by the SORCE / TIM was exactly that," said Greg Kopp, TIM instrument scientist for SORCE and TSIS at LASP. It turned out that the TIM was correct, and all the past irradiance measurements were erroneously high." "That started a whole scientific discussion and the development of a new calibration laboratory for TSI instruments. "The big surprise with TSI was that the amount of irradiance it measured was 4.6 watts per square meter less than what was expected," said Tom Woods, SORCE's principal investigator and senior research associate at the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) in Boulder, Colorado. This improved solar irradiance inputs into the Earth climate and weather models from what was previously available. This was not an error-its Total Irradiance Monitor was ten times more accurate than previous instruments. SORCE's TSI values were slightly but significantly lower than those measured by previous missions. From space, SORCE and other solar irradiance missions measure TSI without interference from Earth's atmosphere. Sunspots (darkened areas on the Sun's surface) and faculae (brightened areas) create tiny TSI variations that show up as measurable changes in Earth's climate and systems. Total solar irradiance, or TSI, is the total amount of solar energy that reaches the Earth's outer atmosphere in a given time. SORCE's four instruments measured solar irradiance in two complementary ways: Total and spectral. If you know how the Sun is varying and can extend that knowledge into the future, you can then put the anticipated future solar input into climate models together with other information, like trace gas concentrations, to estimate what our future climate will be." Secondly, we've debated for years, is the Sun getting brighter or dimmer over hundreds of years? We live only a short period, but an accurate trend will become very important. "Climate scientists need to know how much the Sun varies, so they know how much change in the Earth's climate is due to solar variation. "These measurements are important for two reasons," said Dong Wu, project scientist for SORCE and TSIS-1 at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
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Scientists need accurate measurements of solar power to model these processes, and the technological advances in SORCE's instruments allowed more accurate solar irradiance measurements than previous missions. Energy from the Sun, called solar irradiance, drives Earth's climate, temperature, weather, atmospheric chemistry, ocean cycles, energy balance and more. The mission's legacy is continued by the Total and Spectral solar Irradiance Sensor (TSIS-1), launched to the International Space Station in December 2017, and TSIS-2, which will launch aboard its own spacecraft in 2023. The SORCE team turned off the spacecraft on February 25, 2020, concluding 17 years of measuring the amount, spectrum and fluctuations of solar energy entering Earth's atmosphere-vital information for understanding climate and the planet's energy balance.