Proceedings of the workshop: The solar constant and the Earth's atmosphere

Abstract

The paper summarizes the chief points made at an interdisciplinary workshop on the solar constant and the earth's climate, at which the main sessions covered the solar background, the climate record background, solar constant measurements, the effects of solar constant variations on the atmosphere, and future observational programs. Some data and graphs are presented showing the principal features of the earth's climatic history in the past million years, causal factors in climatic change during the earth's history, the variance spectrum of climatic change, potential origins of climatic change as a function of time scale of the change, direct measurements of the solar constant, relations between the solar constant, the earth's surface temperature, and the percentage of ice cover for Seller's global-averaged models, and experiments proposed for the NASA program of measuring the total and spectral irradiance of the sun from spacecraft.

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