The Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) Mission for the NASA Earth Observing System (EOS)

Abstract

The NASA Earth Observing System (EOS) is an advanced study of Earth's long-term global changes of solid Earth, its atmosphere, and oceans and includes a coordinated collection of satellites, data systems, and modeling. The EOS program was conceived in the 1980s as part of NASA's Earth System Enterprise (ESE). The Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) is one of about 20 missions planned for the EOS program, and the SORCE measurement objectives include the total solar irradiance (TSI) and solar spectral irradiance (SSI) that are two of the 24 key measurement parameters defined for the EOS program. The SORCE satellite was launched in January 2003, and its observations are improving the understanding and generating new inquiry regarding how and why solar variability occurs and how it affects Earth's energy balance, atmosphere, and long-term climate changes.

Investigation of the environment around close-in transiting exoplanets using cloudy

“…We ran CLOUDY 3 in an open geometry and in coronal equilibrium assuming a constant temperature of 1 × 10 6 K (see description below about why this is a good assumption), a nominal magnetosheath width (∆rm) of 0.24 RJup , an orbital distance (a) of 0.023 au (the orbital distance of WASP-12b; Hebb et al 2009), and a solar metallicity ([F e/H]) for the cloud (Table 1). The external radiation field was a solar spectrum taken from stitching together data from the TIMED-SEE (Woods et al 2000) and SORCE (Anderson & Cahalan 2005) satellites ( Figure 3). We then varied the hydrogen density (nH ) in the cloud between 10 4 − 10 8 cm −3 and calculated the output spectrum.…”

“…Solar spectrum input into CLOUDY as the external radiation field incident on the cloud. The spectrum was taken from stitching together data from the TIMED-SEE (Woods et al 2000) and SORCE (Anderson & Cahalan 2005) satellites.…”

Impacts of extreme weather events on highly eutrophic marine ecosystem (Rogoznica Lake, Adriatic coast)

“…The marine ecosystem fluctuations driven by climate variability have been observed in the various regions of the world's seas (Anderson and Cahalan, 2005;Zhang and Gong, 2005), and in the Mediterranean (Colmenero-Hidalgo et al, 2004). The extreme weather events (droughts, floods, tropical cyclones, heat waves, intense precipitation i.e.…”

How to reduce long-term drift in present-day and deep-time simulations?

“…High-accuracy measurements from satellite programs as CE-RES (Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (Wielicki et al 1996)) and SORCE (Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (Anderson and Cahalan 2005)) have constrained the radiation fluxes at TOA with uncertainty range of less than 1 Wm −2 . The resulting imbalance at TOA is in agreement with that determined from changes in ocean heat content that amounts to 0.8 ± 0.2 Wm −2 (Hansen et al 2011;Wild et al 2013).…”