Towards Production of an Updated National Solar Radiation Database

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory and collaborating agencies are working towards an update of the 30-year 1961-1990 National Solar Radiation Data Base (NSRDB). This update will include hourly solar radiation values (almost entirely modeled) for global, direct, and diffuse solar values, as well as accompanying meteorological data. The data set covers the 1991-2000 decade and incremental annual data sets from 2001-2005. An important enhancement relative to the original NSRDB will be an hourly 10-km x 10-km gridded data set for the United States (excluding northern Alaska above 60 deg) produced by the State University of New York at Albany. This satellite-derived data set will not span the entire period back to 1991, but rather will begin in 1998 when the satellite image archive was initiated. The updated NSRDB will be transferred to the National Climatic Data Center for distribution.