NREL National Solar Radiation Database (NSRDB)
Overview
NSRDB
The National Solar Radiation Database (NSRDB) is a serially complete collection of meteorological and solar irradiance data sets for the United States and a growing list of international locations for 1998-2020. The NSRDB provides foundational information to support U.S. Department of Energy programs, research, and the general public.
The NSRDB provides time-series data at 30-minute resolution averaged over surface cells of 0.038 degrees in both latitude and longitude, or nominally 4 km in size. The solar radiation values represent the resource available to solar energy systems. The data was created using cloud properties which are generated using the AVHRR Pathfinder Atmospheres-Extended (PATMOS-x) algorithms developed by the University of Wisconsin. The Fast All-sky Radiation Model for Solar Applications (FARMS) * in conjunction with the cloud properties, aerosol optical depth (AOD), and precipitable water vapor (PWV) from ancillary sources * is used to estimate solar irradiance (GHI, DNI, and DHI).
The Global Horizontal Irradiance (GHI) is computed for clear skies using the REST2 model. For cloud scenes identified by the cloud mask, FARMS is used to compute GHI. The Direct Normal Irradiance (DNI) for cloud scenes is then computed using the DISC model. The PATMOS-X model uses half-hourly radiance images in visible and infrared channels from the GOES series of geostationary weather satellites. Ancillary variables needed to run REST2 and FARMS (e.g., aerosol optical depth, precipitable water vapor, and albedo) are derived from the the Modern Era-Retrospective Analysis (MERRA-2) dataset. Temperature and wind speed data are also derived from MERRA-2 and provided for use in the System Advisor Model (SAM) to compute PV generation.
The following variables are provided by the NSRDB:
- Irradiance:
- Global horizontal (ghi)
- Direct normal (dni)
- Diffuse (dhi)
- Clear-sky irradiance
- Global horizontal (clearsky_ghi)
- Direct normal (clearsky_dni)
- Diffuse (clearsky_dhi)
- Cloud type (cloud_type)
- Dew point (dew_point)
- Temperature (air_temperature)
- Surface albedo (surface_albedo)
- Pressure (surface_pressure)
- Relative humidity (relative_humidity)
- Solar zenith angle (solar_zenith_angle)
- Precipitable water (total_precipitable_water)
- Wind direction (wind_direction)
- Wind speed (wind_speed)
- Fill flag (fill_flag)
- Angstrom wavelength exponent (alpha)
- Aerosol optical depth (aod)
- Aerosol asymmetry parameter (asymmetry)
- Cloud optical depth (cld_opd_dcomp)
- Cloud effective radius (cld_ref_dcomp)
- Cloud pressure (cloud_press_acha)
- Reduced ozone vertical path length (ozone)
- Aerosol single-scatter albedo (ssa)
Storage resources
Data are available as HDF (.h5) files on Azure Blob Storage in the East US Azure region, in the following container:
https://nrel.blob.core.windows.net/nrel-nsrdb
Americas data
Within the above container, files for the Americas (CONUS, Central America, and much of Canada and South America) are named as:
v3/nsrdb_[year].h5
year is a four-digit year from 1998 to one year behind the present date.
For example, the following file contains solar radiation data for the Americas for 2007:
https://nrel.blob.core.windows.net/nrel-nsrdb/v3/nsrdb_2007.h5
See the NSRDB coverage map for more information about the extent of the “Americas” region.
Puerto Rico data
Within the above container, files for Puerto Rico are named as:
v3/puerto_rico/nsrdb_puerto_rico_[year].h5
year is a four-digit year from 1998 to one year behind the present date.
For example, the following file contains solar radiation data for Puerto Rico for 2007:
https://nrel.blob.core.windows.net/nrel-nsrdb/v3/puerto_rico/nsrdb_puerto_rico_2007.h5
Data format
The variables mentioned above are provided in two dimensional time-series arrays with dimensions (time x location). The temporal axis is defined by the time_index dataset, while the positional axis is defined by the meta dataset. For storage efficiency, each variable has been scaled and stored as an integer. The scale factor is provided in the psm_scale-factor attribute. The units for each variable’s data are also provided as an attribute (psm_units).
Citation
Users of the NSRDB should please cite:
Sample code
A complete Python example of accessing and rendering a video is available in the accompanying sample notebook.
Mounting the container
We also provide an API to get read-only SAS (shared access signature) tokens to allow access via, e.g., BlobFuse, which allows you to mount blob containers as drives:
https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/api/sas/v1/token/nrel/nrel-nsrdb
API documentation is at https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/api/sas/v1/docs.
Mounting instructions for Linux are here.
Additional resources
Contact
For questions about this dataset, contact aiforearthdatasets@microsoft.com.
Notices
Microsoft provides this dataset on an “as is” basis. Microsoft makes no warranties (express or implied), guarantees, or conditions with respect to your use of the dataset. To the extent permitted under your local law, Microsoft disclaims all liability for any damages or losses * including direct, consequential, special, indirect, incidental, or punitive * resulting from your use of this dataset. This dataset is provided under the original terms that Microsoft received source data.