Completing Production of the Updated National Solar Radiation Database for the United States

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) have released the 1991–2005 National Solar Radiation Database (NSRDB), an update of the 1961–1990 NSRDB released in 1992. The updated NSRDB data sets are available in several forms, including an hourly ground-based data set of solar and meteorological fields for 1454 stations, an hourly 10km gridded time series data set of solar data based on satellite modeling (1998–2005), and summary statistical files. Eight hundred fifty eight sites have a complete 15-year period of record, and another 596 sites have data for at least 3 of the 15 years (though not necessarily serially complete). All of the 239 original NSRDB sites are included in the update. Data sets including both solar and meteorological data are available from NCDC, and a research data set with extended solar and related fields is available from NREL. Fees to access data sets that contain meteorological fields may apply, according to the NCDC distribution infrastructure.