Limonene ,

There are 2 reasons:

  1. Those two graphs have different scales on the y-axis. One is Irradiance per nanometer of wavelength, and one is Irradiance per terahertz of frequency. Both graph’s y-axis are called “spectral irradiance”, despite being different things. This causes most of the distortion between the two graphs, and can even change the location of the absolute maximum.
  2. The graphs’ x-axis have different units. This causes some distortion too, but wouldn’t change the absolute maximum. It would help if they used a log scale in both cases, because wavelength and frequency are inversely related, so then the graphs could just be horizontally flipped.

So, look at the top graph (by wavelength), and see how much power is in that 1000-2000nm area. It’s still a lot, just spread out over a large area. It’s the same amount of power in the lower graph (by frequency) shoved into the much smaller area from 150THz to 300THz. Since it’s in a smaller area on the lower graph, it has more power-per-unit-of-x-axis.

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