Continental United States Solar Irradiance

Description

The data was obtained from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's (NREL's) National Solar Radiation Database (NSRDB), with a focus on the continental United States. we consider solar irradiance data from the NSRDB in terms of direct normal irradiance (DNI) and diffused horizontal irradiance (DHI) at an approximately 4-km x 1/2-hr spatiotemporal resolution. The solar dataset produced for this work samples data at an hourly temporal resolution from 6 am to 6 pm for the years 2007 to 2013. The test dataset contains datapoints sampled from 2014. A 1D array of data points is provided along with latitude and longitude metadata for each point. We re-arrange this 1D array into a 2D image based on the lat/long metadata. These 2D arrays of DNI and DHI are chipped into 100 x 100 patches. Low resolution imagery is obtained by sampling high resolution data at every fifth data point. All data files are made available as PNGs in their respective LR or HR resolutions.

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