jameswilburlewis
commented
6 months ago Vassilis replies:
It looks like pser is not properly calibrated, so I am cc-ing Jim McTiernan and Jim L. to see if/what in the calibration might differ. We rarely use pser data because it has few look directions and they are more prone to contamination from bins that suffer from sun, or electronic cross-talk from the sun.
From Lucas Liuzzo (liuzzo@berkeley.edu):
I'm working on going through some SST data, and I noticed a noticeable difference between the "full" and "reduced" data products for electrons (foil). Namely, the psef product generally seems to be anywhere from a factor of ~1 to 5 times higher than the pser product. In addition, the energy range of pser seems to be broader (reaching nearly 3 MeV) than psef (which tops out near 700 keV).
I've provided an example figure below, from January of this year during a SEP event. You can see that before event onset (e.g., near 14:00 on the 10th), the psef fluxes are a factor of a few larger than pser. The same is true after onset (e.g., near 04:00 on the 11th).
I've also attached a second figure below, which, in the top panel, shows the 2-hour average of the differential energy flux spectrum from 14:00-16:00 on the 10th. Solid lines are psef, dashed are pser, with black lines corresponding to THB and red to THC. The bottom panel shows the ratio between psef and pser, again for (black) THB and (red) THC. You can see that the difference is energy-dependent.
Do you have any idea what is going on behind the scenes to cause these not-so-subtle differences? I've found quite a few times where this happens, but I can't come up with a physical/instrumental reason that pser fluxes should be lower than psef, and I don't quite understand why the pser energy range is broader (especially when pser is also higher time-resolution). For what it's worth, the fluxes from the ion products do not show this same behavior (i.e., the fluxes between psif and psir are similar), and the energy range makes more sense to me (where psif extends to higher energies than psir).