An Independent Review of Existing Total Solar Irradiance Records

With the advent of space-based total solar irradiance (TSI) observations about 35 years ago, researchers’ understanding of solar variability and its causes has greatly improved. Controversies regarding the cross-calibration of the data from various TSI instruments have resulted in many different TSI composite time series. These composites agree well with each other on timescales ranging from days to years, but due to the limited stability of the instruments contributing to the composites, their quality is not yet sufficient to unambiguously detect possible changes between subsequent cycle minima. In this paper, the construction of the three most prominent TSI composite time series and the underlying TSI models is addressed. The difficulties associated with the cross-calibration of the data are considered, and the viewpoints of the different groups involved in the development of the composites are discussed.