Solar irradiance estimation for planetary studies

Abstract

Solar irradiance is the main source of energy input to the planets of the Solar System. The solar rotation and the evolution of active regions on the surface of the Sun are two of the sources of solar irradiance variability. Nèmec et al. (2020) showed that the variability of solar irradiance is dominated by one of these two sources depending on the timescale of interest. The solar rotation dominates the variability for periods between 4-5 days and the synodic solar rotation period (27.3 days), while the evolution of active regions dominate for the remaining timescales.Usually, the irradiance measurements at Earth are extrapolated to estimate the irradiance at other planets and study the effect of solar irradiance on other planets' atmospheres (Thiemann et al., 2017). In this "lighthouse model", the irradiance source regions on the surface of the Sun are assumed to simply rotate with a Carrington sidereal period of 25.38 days. This means that the solar rotation is the only cause of variability of the irradiance in this model, and the evolution of active regions is neglected.In this work, we develop a model to calculate the irradiance at other planets by accounting for the evolution of magnetic features. Our method follows the Spectral And Total Irradiance REconstruction (SATIRE; Fligge et al. 2000; Krivova et al. 2003) approach and works by Nèmec et al. (2020) and Sowmya et al. (2021). First, the Surface Flux Transport Model (SFTM; Cameron et al. 2010) is used to obtain the time-dependent surface distribution of magnetic features (faculae and spots). Then, the solar irradiance is calculated as the sum of the contributions from the quiet Sun (i.e., regions with no magnetic activity), faculae, and spots. Our method allows calculating the solar irradiance directly at a given position within the ecliptic, regardless of the position of the Earth. We compare our irradiance calculations with those of the extrapolation method. We find that taking the evolution of active regions into account improves the estimation of solar irradiance significantly, especially when it comes to wavelengths in the visible and infrared ranges. Therefore, we suggest that our method provides more accurate estimates of solar irradiance to be used as input in studies of planetary atmospheres.We would like to note that our method of irradiance calculation is currently only statistical. We use the SFTM as we do not have information of the areas of the far-side of the Sun, which are needed in order to get the correct rotational variability. To determine real daily values of irradiance, we need to combine our calculations with methods of helioseismology, which is still a work in progress.