A New Software for Monitoring Solar Radiation Using Information from Satellite Images and Free Data Sources
Abstract
To characterize the real solar radiation in sites where Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plants are going to be settled, local meteorological data have to be measured. Detailed studies demonstrate that even when the measured data have passed most of the standard quality procedures, wrong values could still be labeled as valid in the final data set. In this paper, a new software for monitoring and validating measurements from meteorological stations is presented. The software has been created in order to handle measurements of solar radiation and meteorological data from several stations easily. All the data from the meteorological stations are georeferenced, and can be accessed via a main window of the web interface. The software, promoted by CENER, aims to provide control tests to ensure the quality of the measured solar radiation data. These control tests are grouped into four main steps: 1- visual checking; 2- standard Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN) procedures; 3- comparison with the satellite-derived irradiance and 4- comparison of data from several stations. A validation of the methodology for the estimation of global irradiance from satellite images has been made in order to check the viability of the quality test based on it.