This paper presents an overview of an ongoing project to develop and deliver a solar mapping processing system to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) using the data sets that are planned for production at the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). NCDC will be producing a long-term radiance and cloud property data set covering the globe every three hours at an approximate resolution of 10 x 10 km. NASA, the originators of the Surface meteorology and Solar Energy web portal are collaborating with SUNY-Albany to develop the production system and solar algorithms. The initial result will be a global long-term solar resource data set spanning over 25 years. The ultimate goal of the project is to also deliver this data set and production system to NREL for continual production. The project will also assess the impact of providing these new data to several NREL solar decision support tools

Bates, John J.

Chandler, William S.

Cox, Stephen J.

Hemker, Charles

Hoell, James M.

Knapp, Kenneth

Perez, Richard

Renne, D.

Schlemmer, James

Sengupta, Manajit

Stackhouse, Paul W.

Westburg, David J.

Zhang, Taiping

NASA Technical Reports Server

 
 
 
TOWARDS AN IMPROVED HIGH RESOLUTION GLOBAL LONG-
TERM SOLAR RESOURCE DATABASE 
 
 
          Paul W. Stackhouse, Jr.                        Stephen J. Cox             
    NASA Langley Research Center                                        William S. Chandler  
                  21 Langley, Blvd., Mail Stop 420              James M. Hoell    
Hampton, VA 23681               Taiping Zhang 
           e-mail: Paul.W.Stackhouse@NASA.gov                             David Westberg 
           Science Systems & Applications Incorporated 
        One Enterprise Parkway, Suite 200   
                        Hampton, VA, 23666 
 
    Richard Perez      David Renné 
                             Charles Hemker                Manajit Sengupta 
                Jim Schlemmer          National Renewable Energy Laboratory 
Atmospheric Sciences Research Center         1617 Cole Boulevard 
State University of New York at Albany          Golden, CO  80401 
251 Fuller Road          david.renne@nrel.gov 
Albany, NY 12203 
                      perez@asrc.cestm.albany.edu 
 
John Bates 
                   Kenneth Knapp 
               National Climate Data Center 
         Federal Building 
                     151 Patton Avenue 
            Asheville, NC 
       Ken.knapp@noaa.gov 
 
 
 
ABSTRACT 
 
This paper presents an overview of an ongoing project to 
develop and deliver a solar mapping processing system to 
the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) using 
the data sets that are planned for production at the National 
Climatic Data Center (NCDC).  NCDC will be producing a 
long-term radiance and cloud property data set covering the 
globe every three hours at an approximate resolution of 10 x 
10 km.  NASA, the originators of the Surface meteorology 
and Solar Energy web portal are collaborating with SUNY-
Albany to develop the production system and solar 
algorithms.  The initial result will be a global long-term 
solar resource data set spanning over 25 years.  The ultimate 
goal of the project is to also deliver this data set and 
production system to NREL for continual production.  The 
project will also assess the impact of providing these new 
data to several NREL solar decision support tools. 
 
1. INTRODUCTION 
 
Considering the possibility of global climate change and the 
global competition for energy resources, there is an 
increasing need to provide improved global Earth surface 
solar resource information.  The capability to improve and 
produce long-term records is needed to better understand 
and quantify potential shifts in the solar resource with 
changes in climatic weather patterns.  Toward this end a 
project was funded under the NASA Applied Science 
program involving the National Aeronautics and Space 
Administration (NASA), National Renewable Energy 
Laboratory (NREL), the State University of New 
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20110011599 2019-08-30T15:33:45+00:00Z
York/Albany (SUNY) Atmospheric Science Research 
Center (ASRC) and the NOAA National Climatic Data 
Center (NCDC) to provide NREL with a global long-term 
advanced global solar mapping production system for 
improved depiction of historical solar resources and 
variability and to provide a mechanism for continual 
updates of solar resource information. This new production 
system is made possible by the efforts of NOAA and NASA 
to completely reprocess the International Satellite Cloud 
Climatology Project (ISCCP) data set that provides satellite 
visible and infrared radiances together with retrieved cloud 
and surface properties on a 3-hourly basis beginning from 
July 1983.  The old version of the ISCCP data provided this 
information for all the world’s available geosynchronous 
satellite systems and NOAA’s AVHRR data sets at a 30 km 
effective resolution [1].  This information plus additional 
atmospheric information was used in NASA GEWEX 
Surface Radiation Budget project to produce the first global 
long-term maps for solar irradiance at a 1x1 degree 
resolution which became the basis for the NASA’s Surface 
meteorology and Solar Energy web portal (SSE, [2,3]).  
This new version will provide a new and improved satellite 
calibration at an effective 10 km resolution.  Thus, working 
with SUNY, NASA will develop and test an improved 
production system that will enable the longest-term global 
solar resource database to date at 10 km spatial resolution.  
     This paper provides an overview of this project together 
with early results.  Since production of the ISCCP has been 
shifted and is being tested at NCDC, we will contrast some 
of the new features of the planned 10 km data set relative to 
the current 30 km data set.  We will also show some of the 
early results in the testing and validation of the improved 
algorithms from SUNY and NASA that will use this new 
ISCCP data set. Lastly, we will identify the next steps in the 
production of the data set including some accuracy goals for 
which the effort is aiming. 
 
2. IMPROVED ISCCP DATA 
 
As noted above the current version of ISCCP, denoted DX, 
has been used to produce global estimates of the solar 
resource.  Under support from both NASA and NOAA, the 
ISCCP project is in the process of improving this data set by 
a) improving the process of inter-calibrating the visible and 
thermal infrared radiances from the world’s geosynchronous 
and polar orbiting imagers, b) improving several important 
inputs (such as aerosols, meteorological profiles and surface 
properties, and c) providing satellite radiances and retrieved 
cloud and surface properties at all pixels.  Furthermore, the 
ISCCP is delivering the algorithms and production software 
to NCDC for production and archival of the new data 
products.  Some sample products from NCDC have already 
been produced.  Figure 1 provides an illustration of the 
differences in sampling between the current ISCCP DX 
version that contains 8 – 10 km pixels subsampled to 30 km 
and the new version that will contain all pixels (pixel size 
varies slightly on the satellite instrument and channel).   The 
horizontal density of the product together with the 3-hourly 
sampling will provide an opportunity for a long-term solar 
resource data set at higher resolution than has been 
obtainable. 
 
3. INITIAL RESULTS WITH ISCCP B1U 
 
To obtain an early test of the eventual data products, the 
current version of the ISCCP B1U is being tested [4].  The 
ISCCP B1U data set, prepared and archived by NCDC, 
contains the full ISCCP 8-10 km resolution by satellite for 
the world’s geosynchronous platforms (i.e., US GOES, 
Japan’s GMS, Europe’s METEOSATs).  This data set does 
not contain the expected improved inter-calibration, cloud 
properties nor any polar orbiting data sets from NOAA’s 
AVHRR imager.  However, together with ancillary data 
sets, there is enough data to evaluate the application of the 
SUNY ASRC solar algorithm [5] to this data set.  First 
results of this testing are given in Figure 2.  In Figure 2, the 
top panel shows a scatter plot of the ASRC Quad Pixel 
Count directly from GOES-10 to the ISCCP B1U radiances 
computed from GOES-10 image.  The scattering is most 
 
 
 
Fig. 1: Visible radiances from GOES-10 from the current 
ISCCP DX (top panel) and the near future revised ISCCP 
(bottom panel) for the Southwestern US/Northwestern 
Mexico (Baha California on bottom left) on June 1, 2001, 
18Z. 
likely due to the difference in effective pixel size between 
the two input radiance data sets.  The ASRC Quad Pixel is a 
1 km pixel subsampled to 10 km while the ISCCP B1U 
pixel is an actual effective 10 km pixel.  Despite the scatter 
there is good linearity between the two data sets.  This 
implies that the ASRC algorithm can be applied to the 
ISCCP B1U data as is for evaluation.  The result of that 
calculation is shown in the bottom panel of Figure 2 
comparing the first solar fluxes computed directly from the 
ASRC algorithm using ISCCP B1U data against surface 
measurements at the Penn State NOAA SURFRAD site [6].  
 
5. PROPOSED PRODUCTION SYSTEM 
 
The eventual production of a long-term solar resource 
capability that will be delivered to NREL for production 
will require a considerable amount of ancillary data besides 
the ISCCP data sets.  Data products such as column water 
vapor, ozone, snow/ice cover, aerosol optical properties, 
surface ground cover and reflectivity are important to the 
quality of the data products.  To facilitate this, a production 
strategy has been devised and is shown in Figure 3.  Work 
to date has aimed at providing these inputs and the 
development of the production code.  For instance, a time 
series of the Total Solar Irradiance has been constructed 
using the new finding of the NASA SORCE (Solar 
Radiation And Climate Experiment) mission that the solar 
constant is approximately 1361 W m-2 [7]. Addition-ally, a 
new blended global ozone data product has already been 
developed for the production. Tests of various sources of 
column water vapor information are underway.  One source 
being evaluated is the Modern Era Retrospective-analysis 
for Research and Applications (MERRA, [8]).  Lastly, a 
global background aerosol climatology is being prepared 
that can be augmented with important aerosol events in 
time, such as from volcanic aerosol.  Prototypes from these 
various inputs are shown in Figure 3 which also depicts the 
production flow of the data sets to temporally averaged 
solar flux data products. 
 
6. FUTURE WORK 
 
Results to date are preliminary but show promise for using 
the next improved version of the ISCCP data set to produce 
a global long-term map of the solar irradiance.  More 
specifically, the next steps are planned during the course of 
this project are outlined below: 
• Continued testing of the ISCCP B1U data set using 
the SUNY ASRC model and comparing both to 
surface measurements and currently available data 
sets from SRB and SUNY. 
• Continued development of ancillary input required 
for the long-term production of the data products 
• Continued development of the production system 
by adapting current production systems in 
collaboration with SUNY.  
• NASA/SUNY and NCDC collaborate to assess 
new ISCCP data products and incorporate into the 
production system. 
• Testing of both SUNY and NASA solar algorithms 
using the new data sets via comparison to surface 
measurements 
• Evaluation of the new products by comparing 
against currently available solar irradiance products 
available from the National Solar Radiation Data 
Base (NSRDB) 
The goal of this work is the complete production and 
delivery to NREL of the most advanced global solar 
resource data products and capability possible.  Allowing 
for the continual production of the solar resource should 
provide the means to continue to update these solar resource 
databases into the future. 
 
             
                
Fig. 2: The top panel shows the scatter between the 
SUNY ASRC Quad pixel data and the ISCCP B1U 
scaled radiance. The linearity (despite scatter – see text) 
means that the SUNY ASRC solar algorithm can be 
applied using the ISCCP B1U data. Verification is 
shown in the bottom panel where ASRC output using 
ISCCP B1U is compared to SURFRAD measurements 
at the Penn State site in W m-2. 
7. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 
 
This work was completed under NASA’s Science Mission 
Directorate Applied Science Program under research 
announcement NNH08ZDA001N-Decisions program. 
 
8. REFERENCES 
 
(1) Rossow W. B, Schiffer, R. A., “Advances in 
understanding clouds from ISCCP”, Bull. Am. Met. Soc., 80: 
2261-2287, 1999 
(2) Chandler, W. S., P. W. Stackhouse, Jr., C.H. Whitlock, 
J.M. Hoell, D. Westberg, T. Zhang, NASA’s Surface 
Meteorology and Solar Energy Web Portal (Release 6.0). 
Proceedings of Solar 2007, American Solar Energy Society 
Meeting, Cleveland, OH, 7 - 12 July 2007. 
(3) Stackhouse, P., C. Whitlock, W. Chandler, J. Hoell, D. 
Westberg and T. Zhang, NASA’s Support of Integrated 
Renewable Energy Systems Through Provision of Solar and 
Meteorological Resource Information: Proceedings of Solar 
2007, American Solar Energy Society Meeting, Cleveland, 
OH, 7 - 12 July 2007. 
(4) Knapp, K. R., Scientific data stewardship of 
International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project B1 global 
geostationary observations. Journal of Applied Remote 
Sensing, 2, 023548,doi:10.1117/1.3043461, 2008 
(5) Perez, R., et al., A New Operational Satellite-to-
Irradiance Model. Solar Energy, 73(5), 307-317, 2002 
(6) Augustine, J. A., J. J. DeLuisi, and C. N. Long, 
SURFRAD-A National Surface Radiation Budget Network 
for Atmospheric Research, Bull. of Amer. Met. Soc. Vol. 
81, No. 10, pp. 2341-2358, 2000 
(7) Kopp, G., and J. L. Lean, A new, lower value of total 
solar irradiance: Evidence and climate significance, 
Geophys. Res. Lett., 38, L01706, 
doi:10.1029/2010GL045777, 2011 
(8) Bosilovich, M., NASA's Modern Era Retrospective-
analysis for Research and Applications: Integrating Earth 
Observations. Earthzine, Sept. 26, 2008 
 
 
              
Fig. 3: The proposed production system for the development of solar resource data products from the near-future and 
improved long-term ISCCP satellite radiance and cloud data set.  The data product record would commence in July 1983 
and span as close to present as possible.  This new ISCCP will be processed directly by NCDC and the solar resource 
production system will assess NASA and SUNY ASRC solar algorithms to derive the new data products. 


Towards an Improved High Resolution Global Long-Term Solar Resource Database

Towards an Improved High Resolution Global Long-Term Solar Resource Database

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