This page is being created by Alex Hirzel and his research group at Michigan Tech to catalog publicly-available sources of solar irradiance data.
Goals for this page
Measured solar irradiation data is used in forecasting research. This page aims to provide a list of data sources and a summary of each. For now, we are focused on high-resolution (one hour or finer) data.
Main list
| Name | Country | Area | Resolution | Format | Method | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NSRDB | USA | maps of sites: 1961-1990, 1991-2010 | 1 hour | Downloadable `.csv` | ? | "The National Solar Radiation Data Base 1961-1990 (NSRDB) contains 30 years of solar radiation and supplementary meteorological data from 237 NWS sites in the U.S., plus sites in Guam and Puerto Rico." Also: manual1990 manual2010 |
| USCRN | country | area | resolution | format | method | notes |
| CONFRRM | USA | map | ||||
| NREL MIDC | USA | map list | ? | ? | method | notes |
| WRDC | worldwide (many countries) | map | hourly, daily | tabulated HTML | (values don't seem to be W/m^2?) | data here |
| UTE (Uruguay national electric company) | Uruguay | ? | 10 minute | probably not publicly available | Kipp & Zonen CMP6 pyranometers, | described in Section 3.2 of this paper |
| CNE-GTZ (Spanish) | Chile | Pozo Almonte | monthly mean, daily sum, and one randomly-chosen day at 1 hour resolution | ? | Kipp & Zonnen CMP11 pyranometers | referenced in this paper, see Figure 3 |
| National Solarimetric Archive (link? I can't read Spanish) | Chile | several (sporadic) | monthly mean and one typical clear sky day at 1 hour resolution | ? | ? | stations operated for various time periods, 2 to 21 years, calibration/uncertainty information is unavailable referenced in this paper, see Table 1 |
| Dirección Meteorológica de Chile (Spanish) | Chile | several (sporadic) | 10 minute | excel spreadsheet | pyranometer | publically available, small fee covers processing costs. referenced in this paper, see Table 2 |
| paper?? | Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, China, India, Nepal, Iceland, Japan | ? | ? | ? | see Japanese references | This paper references observations made/published by a Japanese team. Looks like good data behind a language barrier. May be able to email authors for data. |
| (from Tropical Glaciology Group at U of Innsbruck, Austria) | Peru | Glaciar Artesonraju, Peruvian Andes | 30 minute | ? | Kipp & Zonen CNR1 pyranometer | may be able to email authors for data? referenced in this paper, see Section 2.1 |
| (data set referenced in thesis) | Ecuador | various (see pg 29) | hourly, 2-hourly | ? | Kipp & Zonen CM3 pyranometer | dissertation |
| name | country | area | resolution | format | method | notes |
| name | country | area | resolution | format | method | notes |
| name | country | area | resolution | format | method | notes |
| name | country | area | resolution | format | method | notes |
To research further (high priority)
Priority one evaluate: SoDa large list of data files list of sites
Slurp up: SoDa list separated by satellite and ground
Low priority
Lists (to evaluate): [1] [2] [3] big list of canadian sources
Paid data sources: [4] [5] SoDa SolarGIS
Dead links: [6]
Countries completed: Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador
need to do: Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Surinam, Guiana, Brazil, central america
