Open Source Solar Radiation Tools for Environmental and Renewable Energy Applications

Solar energy is the main driver of natural processes on the Earth surface, and is used as an input parameter into many environmental models. Moreover, the importance of solar energy as a source of clean renewable energy for solar electricity and heating/cooling systems is growing worldwide. To improve underst anding of spatial and temporal variations of solar radiation, models integrated in or coupled with geographical information systems (GIS) were developed. The r.sun solar radiation model and other related programes were developed and implemented in the open-source GRASS GIS to deal with the complex chain of algorithms and input parameters needed in solar resource assessments. In this paper, we briefly describe r.sun and related algorithms from the point of view of methodology, input/output data and possible applications. We present application examples mainly in the field of photovoltaics for three different spatial scales (continental, regional and local). The results show that open source concept of the r.sun methodology allows flexible development of the extended models and purpose-driven applications.

HOFIERKA Jaroslav;  HULD Thomas;  CEBECAUER Tomas;  SURI Marcel; 

2008-03-17

International Federation for Information Processing

JRC43644

http://www.isess.org/conferences.asp?Conf=5,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC43644,