Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The act or an instance of exposing to sunlight.
  • noun Therapeutic exposure to sunlight.
  • noun The solar radiation striking Earth or another planet.
  • noun The rate of delivery of solar radiation per unit of horizontal surface.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Exposure to the sun's rays; subjection to the influence of solar heat and light, as for drying, maturing, or the production of chemical action; in medicine, treatment by exposure to the sun, in order to stimulate the vital forces.
  • noun A local injury of plants caused by exposure to too strong light, or to the rays of the sun concentrated as by inequalities in the glass of a greenhouse, producing excessively rapid evaporation which kills the part affected.
  • noun The state of being heated by the sun; the effect of exposure to the sun's rays; specifically, as applied to persons, sunstroke.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The act or process to exposing to the rays of the sun for the purpose of drying or maturing, as fruits, drugs, etc., or of rendering acid, as vinegar.
  • noun A sunstroke.
  • noun Exposure of a patient to the sun's rays; a sun bath.
  • noun (Meteorology) The amount of sunlight impinging on the Earth's surface.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The incident radiant energy emitted by the sun which reaches a unit area over a period of time, typically measured over a horizontal area at the Earth's surface or at the top of Earth's atmosphere.
  • noun The rate of delivery of such radiation.
  • noun The act or process of exposing to the rays of the sun, such as for the purpose of medical treatment, drying or maturing, as fruits, drugs, etc., or of rendering acid, as vinegar.
  • noun medicine, dated sunstroke.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun sudden prostration due to exposure to the sun or excessive heat
  • noun therapeutic exposure to sunlight
  • noun incident solar radiation

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From French, from Latin insolatio ("a setting or placing in the sun")

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Examples

  • And if you do read the paper you see that the secondary effects of the sun's warming have not been assessed so as to say that any warming other than that produced by primary and direct increases in insolation is necessarily anthropogenic.

    The Sun and Global Warming, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009

  • Noting that solar insolation is defined as a measure of solar radiation energy received on a given surface area in a given hour and that carbon sequestration is defined as the process of increasing the carbon content of a reservoir/pool other than the atmosphere.

    First-ever congressional geoengineering report released Juliet Eilperin 2010

  • Noting that solar insolation is defined as a measure of solar radiation energy received on a given surface area in a given hour and that carbon sequestration is defined as the process of increasing the carbon content of a reservoir/pool other than the atmosphere.

    Global convention delegates consider strict limits on climate engineering Juliet Eilperin 2010

  • The insolation is the highest in Spain which, with the low humidity and high atmospheric pressure, create an exceptionally limpid atmosphere.

    Teide National Park, Spain 2008

  • However, concentrator cells, unlike conventional cells, cannot use diffuse sunlight and thus require direct-beam insolation, which is more variable than the total (diffuse plus direct) insolation at a particular site.

    4 Photovoltaics 1994

  • It would correspond to maximum insolation, which is roughly 1,000 watts / m

    The Oil Drum - Discussions about Energy and Our Future 2009

  • Warming in the Lake Baikal region commenced before rapid increases in greenhouse gases, and at least initially, is therefore a response to other forcing factors such as insolation changes. posted by GayandRight @ 10:22 PM

    Archive 2007-10-01 GayandRight 2007

  • Warming in the Lake Baikal region commenced before rapid increases in greenhouse gases, and at least initially, is therefore a response to other forcing factors such as insolation changes. posted by GayandRight @ 10:22 PM

    Did global warming start before the industrial age??? GayandRight 2007

  • #148 The Holocene Optimum is in particular optimum for high-latitude summer time insolation which is why the Artic is comparably warm Milankovitch.

    Peer Review of Bürger and Cubasch « Climate Audit 2006

  • As described earlier in this section, the cost of electricity depends on several factors, such as insolation, system efficiency, lifetime, capital costs, O&M costs, and interest rates.

    4 Photovoltaics 1994

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