Structure of a comprehensive solar radiation dataset

摘要

A new, comprehensive, file format has been developed for solar and other meteorological data from the University of Oregon's Solar Radiation Monitoring (UO SRML) network in the Pacific Northwest. In an effort to provide essential information that would enable users to assess the quality and uncertainty in the data, a more comprehensive file format was developed that contains significantly more information about the station and the various instruments used to make the measurements. The file format utilizes month blocks and starts with a header containing detailed information about the site location, instruments used, calibration values utilized, and uncertainties in the calibration values. The second region of the file contains daily metadata for the instruments and useful information about the extraterrestrial irradiance and average nighttime offsets. After the metadata come the short-term data values and associated flags that help describe the status of the data. In addition, a variety of time stamps are used to facilitate the use of the data. The format also contains room for comments about the data, intended to help users see what was done to the data during the analysis process. Data in this comprehensive format is available on the UO SRML website at. (http://solardat.uoregon.edu/SelectArchivalUpdatedFormat.html).