NASA TCTE: Total Solar Irradiance Measurements, 2013-2019

NASA's TCTE mission provided daily and 6-hour averaged total solar irradiance (TSI) measurements from November 2013 to June 2019. The data, collected by the Total Irradiance Monitor (TIM) instrument, are normalized to one astronomical unit and have a designed absolute accuracy of 350 parts per million. This final version (004) of the data product supersedes all previous releases and is delivered in ASCII column-formatted files.

Use Cases

• Modeling solar influence on Earth's climate based on total solar irradiance time-series data.
• Analyzing long-term solar variability trends using daily and 6-hour averaged measurements.
• Calibrating other solar observation instruments by comparing with the TCTE/TIM's high-accuracy data.
• Studying the correlation between solar irradiance and atmospheric phenomena mentioned in the description.

Strengths

• High instrument precision with a long-term relative accuracy of 10 parts per million per year.
• Provides mission-long data in a single ASCII file for ease of use.
• Final version (004) supersedes all previous versions, indicating a stable, curated product.
• Designed to overlap with the SORCE mission for data continuity from 2003.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data sampling was reduced to weekly from May to December 2014, which the description states 'greatly subsample[s] the true solar variability, and thus have little value for solar research'.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale ML projects.

Provenance

Source

NASA (likely via the SORCE/TCTE missions)

Collection Method

Measured by the Total Irradiance Monitor (TIM) instrument, an ambient temperature active cavity radiometer.

Time Range

November 2013 to June 2019

Freshness

Mission ended June 30, 2019; data is historical and complete.

Geography

Solar observations, normalized to 1 Astronomical Unit (AU)