Irradiance Data Sources for Performance Modeling
Typical Meteorological Years

National Solar Radiation Database

The National Solar Resource Data Base (NSRDB) compiled by NREL contains measured and modeled solar irradiance and weather data for two time periods:

  1. 1961-1990 – Original version (237 National Weather Service sites in the U.S. including sites in Guam and Puerto Rico).  This data base is the basis for the TMY2 files.
  2. 1991-2005 – Update version (1,454 locations in the U.S. including territories).  This data is the basis for TMY3 files.  This has been superseded by the update below.
  3. 1991-2010 - Update version (1,454 locations in the U.S. including territories).  This update made in 2012 includes 10-km gridded data from SolarAnywhere, a satellite irradiance product from Clean Power Research.