Access and manipulate some publicly available solar data

There are many publicly available solar datasets. This package contains functions to download and manipulate these datasets. Currently available ones include:

• NREL Physical Solar Model (PSM) version 3, gridded satellite-derived irradiance data
• NREL Oahu Solar Measurement Grid (OSMG), dense sensor network in Oahu, Hawaii
• NOAA Surface Radiation (SURFRAD), long-term high-resolution ground-based irradiance data
• NASA Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), digital elevation model data
• SoDa Linke Turbidity Factor (LTF), Linke turbidity data
• WRMC Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN), long-term high-resolution ground-based irradiance data

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes.

Prerequisites

This is an R package, so you need to install R on your computer first. In addition, RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R; it is highly recommended.

Installing

Once R and RStudio are installed. Open R or RStudio and install the devtools package, which allows you to install R package from GitHub

install.packages("devtools")

Load the package that you just installed

library("devtools")

Now, you can install the SolMod package, using

install_github("dazhiyang/SolarData")

Running the tests

This code segment gives an example on how to run transposition modeling (horizontal to tilt) using a variety of models. (This is not up to date)

library("SolarData")

#get SURFRAD data from Goodwin_Creek_MS (gwn) station, for the first three days in 2004
SURFRAD.get(station = 'Goodwin_Creek_MS', year = '2004', day_of_year = c(1:3))

#get PSM data for two locations
PSM.get(lat = c(42.05, 44), lon = c(-124.02, -110), api_key <- 'FVltdchrxzBCHiSNF6M7R4ua6BFe4j81fbPp8dDP', attributes <- 'ghi,dhi,dni,clearsky_dhi,clearsky_dni,clearsky_ghi,solar_zenith_angle', name = 'John+Smith', affiliation = 'Some+Institute', year = '2016', leap_year = 'true', interval = '30', utc = 'false', reason_for_use = 'research', email = 'yangdazhi.nus@gmail.com', mailing_list = 'false')

#get SRTM, i.e., digital elevation model, data for two boxes with resolution 3 arcsec
SRTM.list(3, want.plot = TRUE) #check available files
files <- c("Eurasia/N00E072.hgt.zip", "Eurasia/N00E073.hgt.zip")
SRTM.get(resolution = 3, files = files)

License

This package is under the GPL-2 license.