TMY3 Data?

One of the biggest things that keeps our company from using SAM consistently as a useful tool is that fact that TMY3 data is not available on it, and there are generally too few TMY2 data points to rely on them for accuracy on a given project.

When do you expect to add TMY3 data to the weather data file?

Thank you.

Hello,
For the next version of SAM, we plan several major changes, including improvements to the weather file reader that will make it possible for us to include a much larger collection of files that we do currently. One reason we don't include the complete TMY3 set with SAM is that it would result in a very large installation file that would take a long time to download from the SAM website.
For now, you could include the complete set of TMY3 files from the NREL NSRDB website: rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/1991-2005/tmy3/ , and put them in your SAM weather folder. Then the files would be available from SAM.
The only problem with that approach is that the weather files are named by their station ID number, which makes it difficult to identify the files. That's why part of our work for the next release is renaming the files that we include with SAM to make it easier to identify them.
Best regards,

Paul.