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What's New in the NSRDB

Conference ·

The National Solar Radiation Database (NSRDB) provides solar resource data across the globe at a high temporal and spatial resolution. This data is primarily used in solar energy modeling. The NSRDB is updated annually for the United States and North, Central and South America and the data is currently available from 1998-2021. In 2022 the NSRDB was updated using the latest version of the underlying Physical Solar Model (PSM). This update includes improved surface albedo and gap-filling of cloud properties. The inclusion of these updates reduced the uncertainty in the data compared to previous versions of the NSRDB. The Himawari and Meteosat Indian Ocean Data Coverage (IODC) satellites were added to the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) and made our coverage global. While standard data from the GOES continues to be served at an hourly 4km x 4km resolution, full resolution data has also been made available to the user. The NSRDB now contains over 200Tb of data with nearly 40Tb being added annually. We provide significant flexibility for data download depending on the amount of data required by the users. In this paper we provide an update on the current status on the NSRDB.

Research Organization:
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)
DOE Contract Number:
AC36-08GO28308
OSTI ID:
2310356
Report Number(s):
NREL/CP-5D00-88900; MainId:89679; UUID:da88ee57-6a99-4d59-a130-ebaa02d64616; MainAdminId:71892
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

References (8)

The National Solar Radiation Data Base (NSRDB) journal June 2018
Physics-guided machine learning for improved accuracy of the National Solar Radiation Database journal January 2022
A Fast All-sky Radiation Model for Solar applications with Narrowband Irradiances on Tilted surfaces (FARMS-NIT): Part II. The cloudy-sky model journal August 2019
The Pathfinder Atmospheres–Extended AVHRR Climate Dataset journal June 2014
A Physics-Based DNI Model Assessing All-Sky Circumsolar Radiation journal March 2020
Estimating Ultraviolet Radiation From Global Horizontal Irradiance journal January 2019
A Fast All-sky Radiation Model for Solar applications with Narrowband Irradiances on Tilted surfaces (FARMS-NIT): Part I. The clear-sky model journal November 2018
A Fast All-sky Radiation Model for Solar applications (FARMS): Algorithm and performance evaluation journal October 2016

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