Solar irradiance reconstruction over the telescopic era using a revised photospheric magnetic field model

¹ Max-Planck-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung, Justus-von-Liebig-Weg 3 Göttingen, Germany
² Technische Universität Braunschweig, Universitätsplatz 2, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany

^★ Corresponding author: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Received: 19 January 2026
Accepted: 4 March 2026

Abstract

The Sun is the primary source of energy for Earth and one of the main external drivers of its climate. Solar irradiance – the radiative power emitted by the Sun and received at 1 AU – varies on all observable timescales. It is measured as the total solar irradiance (TSI), the spectrally integrated flux, or as spectral solar irradiance (SSI), its wavelength-dependent distribution. However, direct space-based irradiance measurements span only about five decades and are too short to capture long-term trends, making reconstructions crucial for studying the solar influence on Earth’s climate. On climate-relevant timescales, irradiance variations are driven by changes in the solar surface magnetic field, which form the basis of reconstructions guided by physics. Here we present revised reconstructions of TSI and SSI over the past four centuries using the physics-based SATIRE-T (Spectral And Total Irradiance REconstruction, for the Telescopic era) model. SATIRE-T relates irradiance variability to the evolution of the solar surface magnetic field inferred from sunspot number records. In this work, we implement a recently revised description of magnetic field evolution that more realistically links the emergence of small-scale magnetic features to sunspot activity, constrained by modern observations. Using two independent sunspot number series as inputs, we obtain consistent reconstructions of magnetic flux and solar irradiance. The model reproduces the observed or independently reconstructed total and open magnetic flux, and agrees closely with satellite measurements of TSI and Lyman-α irradiance, with correlation coefficients of 0.81–0.98 for 81-day-smoothed space-based TSI records, 0.69–0.85 for TSI at daily cadence, and 0.92 for daily Lyman-α irradiance. On secular timescales, the reconstructed TSI increases by 0.67–0.75 W/m² between the 50-year means over 1650–1700 and 1967–2017.