Error Downloading Weather Files for All Years (P50/P90)

I have a good amount of experience pulling both solar and wind weather files from SAM and am used to the "it doesn't always work, try again" troubleshooting method. But I am now experiencing a new error when I go through PVWatts and do a "No Financial" model to pull "Download Weather Files" in the "Location and Resource" section.

In the past I have never had trouble pulling weather files for "Multiple locations" by importing a CSV with the desired Lat, Longs and then using the drop down to set "Download files for all years (P50/P90)". This has allowed me to pull Hourly or 30-minute data across hundreds of sites and every weather year SAM has available (1998-2018) at one time. Now when I attempt to do this I receive the following error.

Part of Error Message (it successfully pulls the first year of data, but then I receive this error for every subsequent year):
File 2 of 22: 1999

---

developer.nrel.gov/api/solar/nsrdb_psm3_download.csv?api_key= &full_name=sam_user&email=&affiliation=unknown&mailing_list=false&reason=SAM&interval=60&utc=false&leap_day=false&attributes=dni,dhi,ghi,dew_point,air_temperature,surface_pressure,relative_humidity,wind_direction,wind_speed,surface_albedo&attributes=dni,dhi,ghi,dew_point,air_temperature,surface_pressure,relative_humidity,wind_direction,wind_speed,surface_albedo&names=1999&wkt=POINT(-117%2035.280000)
Download time: 0.414000 seconds.
Weather file test failed, first two header lines must have same number of columns: C:\Users\NAME/SAM Downloaded Weather Files/35.28_-117/35.28_-117_35.280000_-117_psmv3_60_1999.csv.
Message from NSRDB: {"inputs":{"full_name":"sam_user","email":"email","affiliation":"unknown","mailing_list":"false","reason":"SAM","interval":"60","utc":"false","leap_day":"false","attributes":["dni,dhi,ghi,dew_point,air_temperature,surface_pressure,relative_humidity,wind_direction,wind_speed,surface
* File renamed to: C:\Users\NAME/SAM Downloaded Weather Files/35.28_-117/35.28_-117_35.280000_-117_psmv3_60_1999_bad.txt.

If I input a single year, I get the same error. If I manually put in the location instead of importing via a CSV I also receive the same error. If I just try to pull one of the years instead of all of them, say 2005, it works.

I tried to search for similar issues in the forum and wasn't able to find any that matched. Thank you all for your help!

Hi J Geddis,

Thank you for reporting this problem. We are working to fix problems with both WIND Toolkit for wind resource and NSRDB for solar resource data downloads. We hope to fix these problems for the next update to SAM 2020.2.29 (Revision 3) by the end of this month. To track progress on this, please see github.com/NREL/SAM/issues/347 .

Best regards,
Paul.

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the quick response and the link to track progress on the fix.

Looking forward to the next revision.

Thanks again,

J Geddis

Hi Paul,

I am a new user to the SAM software, and I have been experiencing an issue whenever I run simulations. The PVS3 Hourly goes to an array size of 219000 for every output I simulate except the Albedo weather file. Is that issue pretty common?
 

Hi Blessing,

SAM's PV and battery storage models run a simulation over the project life. If you use an hourly weather file for an analysis period of 25 years, you end up with 1 time step/hour * 8760 hours/year * 25 years = 219000 time steps.

The weather file only contains one year of data, so SAM uses the same weather file for the entire analysis period. This is appropriate when you file contains typical meteorological year (TMY) data that uses one year's worth of data to represent the solar resource over a historical period.

SAM displays weather and other time series data that does not vary from year to year under the "Hourly Data" category in tables and graphs on the Results page -- for hourly simulations, these data arrays have 8760 values. It displays data that is calculated over the analysis period under the "Lifetime Hourly Data" category -- for hourly simulations over 25 years, these would have 219000 values.

Best regards,
Paul.

I am unable to download weather files requested by either lat, lon or street address despite trying multiple locations.  I see this issue was supposed to be fixed by 2020.2.29 R3 so I downloaded the latest version but am still unable to download weather files.