Snow Coverage not working with TMY3

Hi,

When I try to run the Snow Coverage feature in SAM 2015.6.30 with TMY3 data I receive an error that says "maximum acceptable number of bad snow depth values has been reached." I do not receive this error when I am running the simulation on a TMY2 weather file. Do I need to convert my TMY3 data to TMY2? If so, how do I do that? I have attached a picture of this error to my post.

Thanks!

Patrick Dawson

Hi Patrick,
That cryptic error message is telling you that the weather file has no snow data. Only the TMY2 data in SAM's default solar library has snow data.
In the next version of SAM that we are finishing up now, we've improved the user interface so that you'll see a message on the Shading and Snow input page that tells you when the weather file does not have snow data.
The new version also downloads data from the new NSRDB -- files from that database include snow data. For now, you can use the NSRDB website to download files from the database and add it to your solar resource library:
nsrdb.nrel.gov
Best regards,

Paul.

Great, thanks Paul!

Hi Paul,

I've been trying to extract individual years of weather data for a location in Colorado. I've found one TMY2 file in SAM (Pueblo) that has TMY2 with snow data, but am trying to find individual years. I've tried several approaches (detailed below) but none have worked. If you could point me to the best approach, that would be much appreciated.

Best regards,
Sophie

Here is what I tried:
-Accessing 1961-1990 data for Pueblo here sam.nrel.gov/NSRDB , but this didn't end up containing snow data
-Using the NSRDB viewer tool nsrdb.nrel.gov/nsrdb-viewer to extract data in a square region containing my location. The region appeared to contain PSM, MTS1, MTS2, MTS3 data. When I looked at the data that could be downloaded, PSM included snow depth, and I clicked on this. However, the data I received had blanks for all the snow depth fields.

Nevermind my question. I now realize that the files I got from the NSRDB viewer tool do indeed have snow depth. I misread the file headers, and thought snow depth was missing, but I now see it there. Nice to know this is available!

Looking at the 1998-2014 snow depth data for several locations and years in the vicinity of my point of interest, they have a very peculiar look to them: essentially, the snow depth is either about 17 cm or 0cm at any given time. I'm wondering if all the 1998-2014 snow depth data has this feature?

In a similar vein: is there any way to access the 1961-1990 snow depth data?