Emerging NOAA Surface Solar Radiation for Solar Energy

Solar power has been growing at an annual rate of 40% in recent years. By 2025 it could grow to 10% of U.S. power needs. Sunlight is the fuel for solar power generation technologies, and as such one needs to know the quality and future availability of the fuel for accurate analysis of system performance. Sunlight (solar radiation) at the surface has been routinely estimated in real time from measurements of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) operated by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS). The GOES solar radiation data have been made available in the GOES Surface and Insolation Product (GSIP) suite since January 1996 for the contiguous U.S. every daytime hour at a spatial resolution of ~50 km (GSIP-V1). Since April 2009, solar radiation retrievals have been performed at a higher spatial resolution (~14 km) and cover larger areas (GSIP-V2). The GSIP-V1 data have recently been screened for quality, adjusted for changes in calibration, and parameters useful for the solar energy sector have been derived for the period of 1999-2009. In this presentation, we describe the quality control process and various adjustments applied, and provide examples of selected solar energy parameters (average, midday and clear-sky insolation, clear-sky days, diffuse and direct normal radiation, etc.) and their evaluation. The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI), one of the flagship instruments of NOAA's new geostationary satellite, GOES-R, will expand frequency and coverage of multispectral remote sensing of atmospheric and surface properties. The planned rapid observations (5-15 minutes) from ABI provide an opportunity to obtain information needed for solar energy applications where frequent observations of solar radiation reaching the surface are essential for planning and load management. The ABI algorithm, that is quite different from the one applied in GSIP-V1 and V2, uses atmospheric and surface data retrieved from multiple narrow bands using algorithms dedicated to the retrieval of these data. The algorithm is currently run with proxy data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) onboard the EOS satellites Terra and Aqua and the Visible and Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) onboard the recently launched Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite. The ABI algorithm will be explained as well as examples will be shown.