The Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) Mission: Final Calibrations and Data Products

Abstract

AbstractThe Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) was a NASA mission that operated from 2003 to 2020 to provide key climate-monitoring measurements of total solar irradiance (TSI) and solar spectral irradiance (SSI). This topical collection provides an overview of some of the key SORCE science results, an overview of mission operations and how anomalies impacted the science observations, a detailed description of the updated algorithms used in producing the final data products of TSI and SSI from the four SORCE instruments, and results from an underflight calibration-rocket experiment flown in June 2018. The 17-year-long SORCE mission has made many contributions to the climate records of TSI and SSI that date back to the 1970s, and, fortunately, similar observations from the Total and Spectral Solar Irradiance Sensor (TSIS-1) are able to continue these Sun-climate records after SORCE without a gap.