Choosing a weather file

Hello, I'm trying to choose a weather file to do some general analysis of the economics of solar in the state of New Jersey. Can someone help me understand the difference between the files that are titled something along the lines of "New_Jersey_nsrdb-GOES-tmy-v4-0-0-60-2023"  and the ones that are titled something more like "New_Jersey_psm3-2-2-tmy_60_tmy"  It seems to matter a lot for my results which I use (the PSM3 weather data yields significantly higher productivity than the data that's just labeled with GOES).  But I understand the PSM3 data uses the GOES satellite, so I'm trying to understand what is different.

Hello,

The GOES V4 files are from a brand new dataset that was just released. In my tests, I found that the data is shifted so that the peak solar resource is around 8 pm instead of Noon. I have alerted the NSRDB team to this problem and understand they are working to fix it. I would avoid using that data until the problem is fixed. If it is fixed in time, the new version of SAM (SAM 2024) will download files from this dataset. (We hope to release the new version of SAM in mid-December.)

The PSM V3 is an earlier dataset. SAM 2023.12.17 downloads files from that dataset when you click Downoad on the Location and Resource page without checking Advanced.

The V4 dataset uses a new model to convert data from satellites and meteorological datasets into the solar resource files. V3 uses an older model. My understanding of the V4 "aggregated" dataset is that it combines files for the most recent years from V4 with files from V3 to create a longer historical period. There should be more information about this on the NSRDB website, and I would suggest contacting the NSRDB team for more details about these datasets: nsrdb.nrel.gov/ .

Best regards,
Paul.