U.S. Solar Radiation Database
We have created a 15 year database from thousands of ground sites with multiple layers of quality control.
Modeling Datasets
10 km gridded data with solar radiation and weather parameters for agricultural and climate modeling.
Engineering Datasets
Hourly solar radiation datasets with additional layers of quality control, customized for your projects.
Request a free data sample!
You can request data for up to 25 locations for free from our database built from thousands of ground sites with quality control.
Request dataMonthly graphical solar atlas of the U.S.
As a public service, we have redone our solar atlas project and made the monthly images available for the years of 2005 through 2019.
DownloadHow does ground data compare to satellite data?
There are uses for both, depending on your location and data needs. Check out technical papers on this subject and our informative videos.
Learn MoreWhere does our solar radiation data come from?
We obtain data from thousands of professionally maintained US sites that belong to universities, government agencies and other groups.
Learn MoreAbout Us
We're a small company and family business focused on mechanical engineering, software development, and implementation of emerging technologies. Our main website is HarvestDataWarehouse.com, which is an agricultural engineering site that further explains our capabilities.
We believe that there is a place for both ground-based measurements and satellite solar radiation datasets, and that the two can complement each other. In the past, this was often done using scientific-quality instrumentation.
Since there are a very limited number of the scientific-quality sites available, we have applied artificial intelligence and statistical techniques to data gathered from thousands of medium-quality sites from 2005-present. Comparing GHI observations and time histories from as many nearby sites as possible allows us to determine how well an individual station is performing.
For white papers, informative videos and more please visit our About page.
How does our data compare with other sources?
Our database was compared with scientific-quality SURFRAD data for daily, hourly, and monthly intervals for 2005-2018. The same comparison was made using NREL’s National Solar Radiation Database, which is derived from satellite data. The satellite data had slightly less Mean Absolute Percent Error on the annual intervals. For monthly intervals, the satellite and our data were close to the same. At daily intervals, our ground data showed half the error of the satellite data. The average Mean Absolute Percent Error for hourly observations was 12% for measured data and 21% for the satellite data.
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Where does our solar radiation data come from?
Our database contains hourly and daily solar radiation and meteorological measurements from over 7000 US sites and nearly 100 different networks. These sites are professionally operated and maintained by various federal agencies, states and universities for specific purposes including climate research, resource management, transportation and agriculture. The average distance between sites in the continental US is about 40 miles, with larger spacings in the in the Great Plains and tighter spacing in more populated areas.
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Try our data challenge!
If you have high-quality solar radiation data for a location, we would encourage you to request our free basic data for that site. We believe you will find that our dataset performs well, especially at the hourly and daily intervals. Solar engineering companies may contact us directly to receive samples of our best data with additional layers of quality control. We welcome the opportunity to demonstrate the integrity of our dataset.