Use of own irradation and weather data

Does SAM provide the option to implement user own irradiation and weather data instead of using the built-in database ?
If that is the case, how can this be implemented and are certain formats needed ?

Thanks

Hello,

You can use weather data from any source, as long as it is properly formatted.

See the "Weather File Formats" section of Help for a description of the formats. For solar resource data, see "SAM CSV Format for Solar" topic: samrepo.nrelcloud.org/help/weather_format_sam_csv_solar.html .

To use the weather file with SAM:

1. On the Location and Resource page, click Add/remove weather file folders and navigate to the folder containing your weather file(s).
2. Choose the weather file from the Solar Resource Library list. If you don't see your file in the list, click Refresh library. The file will only appear in the list if it is correctly formatted, so if you don't see it in the list, check that it is correctly formatted, in the correct units with no data gaps.

Best regards,
Paul.

Thanks a lot for the swift reply !
Will test it

We do not have all the weather data available that are listed for the weather data format, e.g. dew point temperature.
Is it possible to leave "blanks" separated by commas for data in the csv file, which are not available, or must all data be provided ?
Thanks

Hello,

You can use the table in the "Weather Data Elements" topic of Help to see what data each of SAM's solar performance models requires: samrepo.nrelcloud.org/help/weather_data_elements.html .

If you do not have data for a given element like dew point temperature and that element is not required by the performance model you are using, it would be best to omit that column from the weather file rather than include an empty column. The empty column is likely to cause errors when you run a simulation in SAM.

Note that you can include columns of data that the model does not use -- SAM ignores any data columns that it doesn't need, but it does not work well with weather files that have data gaps or missing columns.

Best regards,
Paul.

 

Thank you, Paul, for your continuous suport