Structure of a Comprehensive Solar Radiation Dataset
Abstract
A new, comprehensive, file format has been developed for solar and other meteorological data from the University of Oregon’s Solar Radiation Monitoring network in the Pacific Northwest. The new format utilizes month blocks and starts with a header containing detailed information about the site location, instruments used, calibration values utilized, and uncertainties in the calibration values. The second region of the file contains daily metadata for the instruments and useful information about the extraterrestrial irradiance and average nighttime offsets. After the metadata come the short-term data values and associated flags that help describe the status of the data. In addition, a variety of time stamps are used to facilitate the use of the data. The format also contains room for comments about the data that would help users see what was done to the data during the analysis period. The goal is to make these more comprehensive data files available on the UO SRML website (http://solardata.uoregon.edu).
Keywords
Solar radiation, Resource assessment, Uncertainty