Do Flares Contribute to Total Solar Irradiance Variability ?
Résumé
The Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) varies on all time scales and a major fraction of its variability can be reproduced by considering the appearance and disappearance of features, such as sunspots and faculae, on the solar disk. Other effects (e.g. the so called network), however, are contributing to the variability of the TSI, as evidenced by its unusually low level during the last solar minimum. Here we show that flares of various amplitudes also have a significant impact on the TSI. In contrast to standard belief, the dominant contribution comes from the visible domain. We next estimate the probability distribution of flares versus their total radiative output; previous estimates were restricted to a specific spectral range only (e.g. in the soft X-ray or radio domain) whereas we consider the total energy. The obtained distribution follows a power law; we investigate the possibility of small flares to have a major contribution to the TSI variability. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under the grant agreement SOTERIA (project n° 218816, www.soteria-space.eu)