Guest Post on WUWT by Guillermo Gonzalez

I recently happened upon the SORCE/TIM website and decided to look up the plot of the full total solar irradiance (TSI) dataset .

The SORCE mission began collecting TSI data in February 2003. I was curious to see if the variations in the TSI had begun to rise yet, perhaps indicating a start to cycle 24. Visual inspection of the SORCE TSI plot showed just the opposite - variations continue to decline in amplitude. If cycle 24 has started, there are no signs of it in these data.

We can be a bit more quantitative if we examine, instead, a plot of TSI variance with time. I produced such a plot using the daily average TSI data provided on the SORCE web site.

To compare the recent TSI variance trend with the previous sunspot minimum, I looked up the ACRIM2 daily average TSI data .

These data are plotted on the same scale as the SORCE data. The smoothed data show a minimum TSI variance near the beginning of 1996, some months before sunspot minimum (October 1996). Notice that the minimum value for the variance during the 1996 minimum was about an order of magnitude larger than the present TSI variance.

The SORCE web site quotes long-term 1-sigma precision (relative accuracy) of their TSI measurements to be 0.001%/yr. This corresponds to a variance of 2 ´ 10-4 W2 m-4. However, the precision should be considerably better than this on the 2-week timescale that I selected for calculating the variance. Unfortunately, I have not been able to locate a quote for the estimated precision of the ACRIM2 measurements. It would be worthwhile to know if the minimum TSI variance of the previous sunspot minimum measured by ACRIM2needs to be corrected for the instrumental precision.

Guillermo Gonzalez writes on his background: I’m an astronomer, though my present title is associate professor of physics at Grove City College, PA. I wrote a paper (in Solar Physics) with Ken Schatten back in 1987 on predicting the next solar maximum with geomagnetic indices. That was my only contribution on anything having to do with the Sun-Earth connection, but I also got a letter published in Physics Today in 1997 wherein I urged readers to take the Sun-Earth climate connection more seriously. These days most of my research is on extrasolar planets.

UPDATE: I received a suggestion for an overlay via email from Terry Dunleavy and I’ve worked one up below. This was done graphically. I took great care to get the two lined up correctly.  - Anthony

See larger image here.

See full post and comments here.

Read also Alan Caruba’s Solar Scenario’s which reviews a paper by James Maruzek here.