TSIS TIM: Total Solar Irradiance 24-Hour Means from the International Space Station
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Description
TSIS TIM Level 3 Total Solar Irradiance 24-Hour Means V05 (TSIS_TSI_L3_24HR) provides daily-averaged solar energy output measurements from the Total Irradiance Monitor instrument on the International Space Station. The dataset, produced by GES DISC, contains a single ASCII text file with columns for date, Julian day, wavelength range, instrument mode, data version, irradiance value, uncertainty, and quality flag. TSIS-1 launched in December 2017, and the TIM instrument reports data with an estimated long-term repeatability uncertainty of less than 0.014 W/m^2 per year.
Use Cases
Modeling climate forcing based on total solar irradiance measurements.
Analyzing long-term solar variability trends based on daily-averaged irradiance data.
Calibrating satellite instruments using the reported irradiance uncertainty values.
Studying the Sun's energy output over the mission's time range mentioned in the description.
Strengths
Instrument has long-term repeatability with estimated uncertainties less than 0.014 W/m^2/yr.
Data is reported at a mean solar distance of 1 AU with zero relative line-of-sight velocity, providing a standardized reference.
New data are appended to the single file on a daily basis, suggesting regular updates.
Limitations
Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale analysis.
Accuracy is currently reported as 0.48 W/m^2 but is expected to decrease, indicating ongoing calibration.
Provenance
Source
GES DISC (NASA's Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center).
Collection Method
Measurements from the Total Irradiance Monitor (TIM) instrument on the TSIS-1 mission, mounted on the International Space Station, averaged over 24-hour periods.
Time Range
Mission began after TSIS-1 launch on December 15, 2017 and mounting on the ISS on December 30, 2017; temporal coverage is the length of the mission.
Freshness
New data are appended on a daily basis, but the last update date for the aggregated file is unknown.
Geography
Global measurement from space; data is solar-centric, reported at 1 AU.
Data is in a tabular ASCII text format arranged into a single, growing file; users must handle appending new rows.