Lean is a three time recipient of the NASA Group Achievement Award and an elected member and fellow of several academic societies.

[3] The 1995 paper was published, Lean explains, at a time when there was a lot of speculation about how much solar variability may have influenced climate change in recent centuries.

With this new reconstruction of historical solar irradiance since 1610, scientists could quantitatively estimate the Sun's contribution to global surface temperature changes.

Although subsequent work with NRL co-authors Yi-Ming Wang and Neil Sheeley has since revised the magnitude of the total irradiance change during the past four centuries, the overall approach and methodology were first established in this 1995 GRL paper, which has been cited more than 600 times.

[3] The 2011 paper, written with primary author Greg Kopp, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), was published eight years after the 2003 launch on the Solar Radiation and Climate (SORCE) spacecraft; SORCE carried a new LASP-designed instrument that measured total solar irradiance with superior accuracy and precision.

That higher value was typically used in climate model simulations and other applications needing to know the amount of energy the Sun provides to the Earth.

[1] She was the 2024 recipient of the George Ellery Hale Prize of the American Astronomical Society, given "for her foundational studies in solar irradiance variability and its impact on the Earth’s atmosphere and climate, on time scales from days to centuries".