About the Center
Placed within the Earth-Sun Exploration Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Sun-Climate Center is an integrated program of observational systems and research to improve the understanding and prediction of the response of Earth'sclimate to solar forcing from monthly to multi-centennial time scales, to protect life on Earth, and to ensure the safety of human explorers.
The Sun-Climate Center is one of the nine cross-cutting themes of the Earth-Sun Exploration Division. It is an interdisciplinary union of researchers in the Solar Physics and Climate and Radiation branch at Goddard Space Flight Center.
New high-accuracy measurements allow us to study the link between solar activity and climate changes. Below we included near real-time images of processes that might be crucial for the understanding of the solar influence on climate.
| Modern satellite-based measurements provide information about the variable sun with unprecedent accuracy. The figure shows how the sun presents itself to us at this moment. |  | Sunspots and active regions influence the solar irradiance which determines the energy input into the Earth's climate system. The figure shows the total solar irradiance during the last 3 months. | | There are indications that the variable solar input does significantly influence our climate. The figure shows our weather at this moment. It is yet unclear how the sun contributes to the variability in our climate system. |
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This is the latest Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) image recorded by the SOHO satellite. It was taken in the continuum near the Ni I 6768 Angstroms line. The most prominent solar features are the sunspots on the solar photosphere. This is very much how the Sun looks like in the visible range of the spectrum. | The figure shows the data measured by the Total Irradiance Monitor (TIM) instrument on the SORCE spacecraft. Scientific contact: Dr. Greg Kopp | This is the full disk infrared image from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) mission. More information about the GOES mission | ||