The SOLAR-HRS New High-Resolution Solar Spectra for Disk-Integrated, Disk-Center, and Intermediate Cases

Abstract

The solar spectrum at the top of the atmosphere contains crucial data for solar physics, astronomy, and geophysics. Accurately determining high-resolution solar reference spectra, whether they are disk-integrated, disk-center, or intermediate cases, represents a new challenge and is of primary importance for all applications where spectral solar radiation needs to be evaluated. These spectra are also essential for interpreting remote sensing measurements that rely on sunlight, such as those obtained by Earth observation satellites or spacecraft exploring other planets. This paper lays a foundation for the implementation of multiple new solar irradiance reference spectra that have high resolution and are representative of solar minimum conditions. We developed the SOLAR high-resolution extraterrestrial reference spectra (SOLAR-HRS disk-integrated spectra) by normalizing high-spectral-resolution solar line data to the absolute irradiance scale of the SOLAR-ISS reference spectrum. The resulting one-of-a-kind SOLAR-HRS disk-integrated spectrum has a spectral resolution varying between 0.001 and 1 nm in the 0.5–4400 nm wavelength range. We also implemented a new high-resolution solar spectrum at the disk-center, covering a range of 650–4400 nm with a spectral resolution of 0.001 to 0.02 nm. We further expanded our analysis by producing several solar spectra for ten different solar view angles ranging from μ = 0.9 to μ = 0.05 (SOLAR-HRS intermediate cases). Finally, we developed new Merged Parallelised Simplified ATLAS spectra (MPS-ATLAS) based on solar modeling with Kurucz and Vald3 solar linelists for both the disk-integrated and disk-center spectra. One of the objectives of implementing all these new solar spectra is to fulfill the requirements of the MicroCarb space mission, which focuses on measuring greenhouse gas emissions. The solar data of this study are openly available.