Global Solar Irradiance Data via API

Type

Collection

Title

Brief Title

Global Solar Irradiance Data

Collection Type

Dataset

Access Privileges

Fenner School of Environment & Society

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

10.25911/5c073e713e5dd

Website Address

http://solcast.com.au/solar-data-api/

Metadata Language

English

Data Language

English

Significance Statement

Solar irradiance (global solar radiation) data over all major continents, real-time and historical.

Brief Description

Produced by commercial entity Solcast, through support from ANU technologies built by Dr. Nick Engerer's research group at the Fenner School of Environment and Society via Australian Renewable Energy Agency Funding. Satellite data, along with information from weather models, is used to create an estimate of available solar radiation at the Earth's surface.

Full Description

Data are produced in the following way. Firstly, satellite imagery is taken from the 3rd generation weather satellites (5x in total globally, including the Himawari 8 satellite over Australia). The images have a scan duration of 10-15 mins and are provided
for 16 bands, each with a different scanning wavelength of outgoing terrestrial radiation. The model applied utilises the visible (band 3) and infrared (band 13) images. The images extracted, and re-project spatially, including for parallax errors. The radiation modelling begins with the visible and IR images from the satellites with
pixel size resolution of 1-2 km^2. Solar irradiance is derived following the general principles of the Heliosat-2 methodology. Clouds are decomposed into lower, middle and upper troposphere layers as separated by cloud top temperatures that are inferred through utilisation of the IR image identified cloud-top height and numerical weather model isobaric temperatures obtained from the Global Forecast System (GFS) deterministic model. Total cloudiness is derived through aggregation of the three cloud layers. Total cloud opacity (represented as an index between 0 and 1) is then derived using albedo differences between the lowest visible return value of albedo recorded for each pixel and a continuous running 50 day sample that is updated daily. Derived cloud opacity is then applied as a linear reduction to the Esra clear sky radiation model to produce an estimate of GHI (Global Horizontal Irradiance) at each pixel. The selection of the Esra model was based upon validation against a selection of clear sky radiation models in Australia [20]. Estimates of GHI are then decomposed into direct normal irradiance (DNI) and diffuse horizontal irradiance (DIF) through the Engerer2 separation model. Data are updated live on an AWS based platform and can be extracted via a free API account, available at the project webpage (http://solcast.com.au/solar-data-api/).

Contact Email

nicholas.engerer@anu.edu.au

Contact Address

Fenner School of Environment and Society
College of Science
Frank Fenner Building #141
The Australian National University
Acton ACT 2601

Contact Phone Number

+61 2 6125 1658

Principal Investigator

Dr Nick Engerer

Supervisors

Dr Nick Engerer

Fields of Research

090608 - Renewable Power and Energy Systems Engineering (excl. Solar Cells)

Socio-Economic Objective

9602 - Atmosphere and Weather

Keywords

solar radiation
solar irradiance
atmospheric radiation
solar energy
solar forecasting

Type of Research Activity

Applied Research

Date Coverage

Date From	Date To
2010-01-01	2018-12-31

Geospatial Location

Location Type	Location Value
Text	All Major Continents

Date of data creation

2016-06-01

Year of data publication

2018

Creator(s) for Citation

Given Name	Surname
Nicholas	Engerer

Publisher for Citation

The Australian National University Data Commons

Related Websites

URL	Title
http://solcast.com.au/solar-data-api/	Solcast API Data Access

Access Rights Type

Conditional

Rights held in and over the data

https://articles.solcast.com.au/solar-data-api/free-access-to-solar-irradiance-data-for-non-commercial-research-use

Licence Type

CC-BY-NC-ND - Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDervis (Version 3.0)

Licence

https://solcast.com.au/solar-data-api/api/terms-and-conditions/

Data Location

http://solcast.com.au/solar-data-api/

Retention Period

Indefinitely

Extent or Quantity

Status: Published
Published To:
- Australian National University
- Australian National Data Service
Identifier: anudc:5897