National Solar Radiation Database (NSRDB) Station Data Output for 1991 to 2010

The National Solar Radiation Database (NSRDB) was produced by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory under the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. The NSRDB update is a collection of hourly values of the three most common measurements of solar radiation (i.e., global horizontal, direct normal, and diffuse horizontal) over a period of time adequate to establish means and extremes and at a sufficient number or locations to represent regional solar radiation climates. Nearly all of the solar data in the NSRDB are modeled, and only 40 sites have measured solar data - none of them with a complete period of record. Because of the data-filling methods used to accomplish the goal of serial completeness, NSRDB meteorological data are not suitable for climatological work. The meteorological fields in the NSRDB should be used only as ancillary data for solar deployment and sizing applications. Filled/interpolated meteorological data should not be used for climatic applications. (All such data are flagged.) The serially complete hourly data provided in the NSRDB update are provided in two output formats: 1) ground-based solar and meteorological dataset, and 2) 10 km gridded output produced by the SUNY model. The 1991-2010 NSRDB is an update of the 1991-2005 NSRDB released in 2006 and archived at NCDC. The updated NSRDB dataset an hourly ground-based data set of solar and meteorological fields for 1454 stations. The primary provider for ground-based data is NCDC, which are stored as site-year files in comma-separated value (CSV) American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) format. Station identification numbers use the six-digit United States Air Force (USAF) station ID numbering scheme. The measured solar radiation data came from multiple sources, including: Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program, Department of Energy Florida Solar Energy Center, State of Florida Integrated Surface Irradiance Study and Surface Radiation Budget Measurement Networks, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Air Resources Laboratory and Earth System Research Laboratory Global Monitoring Division Measurement and Instrumentation Data Center, National Renewable Energy Laboratory University of Oregon Solar Radiation Monitoring Laboratory Network University of Texas Solar Energy Laboratory. All meteorological data were provided by the National Climatic Data Center from its Integrated Surface Hourly Database (ISD) product. The NSRDB Statistics Files hold summary statistics for all Class I and Class II stations. The Daily Statistics provide monthly and annual averages of solar radiation and several meteorological parameters for both annual and a 20 year roll-up. The Hourly Statistics provide average diurnal profiles by hour for each station year for each solar parameter. The Persistence Statistics provide multiple levels of persistence for up to 30 days for each station for each solar parameter. These Summary Statistics files are documented in the NSRDB User's Manual.

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Organization: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce