The SRRL was established at the Solar Energy Research Institute (now NREL) in 1981 to provide continuous measurements of the solar resources, outdoor calibrations of pyranometers and pyrheliometers, and to characterize commercially available instrumentation. The SRRL is an outdoor laboratory located on South Table Mountain, a mesa providing excellent solar access throughout the year, overlooking Denver. Beginning with the basic measurements of global horizontal irradiance, direct normal irradiance and diffuse horizontal irradiance at 5-minute intervals, the SRRL Baseline Measurement System now produces more than 130 data elements at 1-min intervals that are available from the Measurement & Instrumentation Data Center Web site. Data sources include global horizontal, direct normal, diffuse horizontal (from shadowband and tracking disk), global on tilted surfaces, reflected solar irradiance, ultraviolet, infrared (upwelling and downwelling), photometric and spectral radiometers, sky imagery, and surface meteorological conditions (temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, precipitation, snow cover, wind speed and direction at multiple levels). Data quality control and assessment include daily instrument maintenance (M-F) with automated data quality control based on real-time examinations of redundant instrumentation and internal consistency checks using NREL's SERI-QC methodology. Operators are notified of equipment problems by automatic e-mail messages generated by the data acquisition and processing system. Radiometers are recalibrated at least annually with reference instruments traceable to the World Radiometric Reference (WRR).
2 Data Resources
Name | Size | Type | Resource Description | History |
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NREL Solar Radiation Research Laboratory BMS | 0 KB | Website | DOI 10.7799/1052221 Datasets including "Live" graphical display, updated every 60 seconds. "Live" PDA display, updated every 60 seconds. "Live" data and plots, updated every 60 seconds. Daily plots and raw data files, including wind roses, are available from July 15, 1981 to yesterday. Solar calendars, are available from July 1981 to the present month. Wind roses for all historical wind data, this includes: Monthly roses for April 1988 to last month. Seasonal roses for Summer 1988 to last season. Yearly roses for 1989 to last year. Historical Monthly data are available, this includes: Quality assessed data for July 1981 to last month. Monthly reports (ASCII) for July 1981 to last month. Cylinder plots for January 1997 to last month. QCFit plots for January 1997 to last month. Full flag summaries for July 1981 to last month. Flag summary tables for July 1981 to last month. Historical reports and plots are available, this includes: Monthly reports (PDF) for July 1981 to last month. Monthly plots for July 1981 to last month. Custom monthly data files can be generated at different time intervals using user-specified fields. Yearly data and plots can be generated using statistics extracted from monthly reports. An All-Sky (180o fish eye lens) Web Cam is available, this includes: A SkyCam Snapshot of the current sky-conditions, updated every 5 minutes. The SkyCam Image Gallery contains historical snapshots every hour (during the day), since September 3, 1999. The Daily SkyCam Animations will animate all the hourly historical snapshots. A Yankee Total Sky Imager (TSI-880) is capturing all sky images and computing cloud cover since July 14, 2004, this includes: Total sky images and "cloud analyzed" images (with cloud cover values), every 10 minutes. Percentage of opaque and total cloud cover included with the BMS "live" and daily time series data stream, every 60 seconds. Several Spectroradiometers have been measuring spectral data, since January 24, 2001, updated every 5 minutes. GPS-based Precipitable Water Vapor (PWV) measurements are available since June 13, 2012, updated every 60 minutes. Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) measurements are available since June 11, 2013, updated every 24 hours. An EKO MS-300LR Sky Scanner has mapped luminance and irradiance, from June 14, 2000 to October 28, 2002, every 15 minutes. Compute the solar position and/or intensity from time and place using MIDC's Solar Position Calculators. | |
Bibliography | 0 KB | Website | Resource bibliography on SciTech Connect DOI 10.7799/1052221 |
Keywords
Submitted
• May •
04
2015
National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Cite This Dataset
Stoffel, T., and A. Andreas. 2015. "NREL Solar Radiation Research Laboratory (SRRL): Baseline Measurement System (BMS); Golden, Colorado (Data)." NREL Data Catalog. Golden, CO: National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Last updated: July 24, 2024. DOI: 10.7799/1052221.
About This Dataset
7
10.7799/1052221
Public
07/24/2024
DOE Project
NREL Solar Radiation Research Laboratory Baseline Measurement System
Funding Organization
Department of Energy (DOE)
Sponsoring Organization
USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Solar Energy Technologies Office (EE-4S)
Research Areas
Energy Analysis
Geothermal Energy
Wind Energy
License
View License
Digital Object Identifier
10.7799/1052221