Weather data in SAM

Hi,
Is there a way where I can consider using intermittent solar data in SAM?
Thank you.

Hello DM,

SAM's solar models require a complete weather file (one year's worth of hourly or subhourly data), except for the pvwattsv5_1ts SSC module, which simulates a PV system for one time step.

We are working on a version of pvsamv1 that works on a single time step, but it is not yet available.

Otherwise, to run a simulation with weather data for part of a year, you could put the data for the time of interest into the correct rows of an existing weather file and ignore the results for the other time steps. For example, if you have weather data for June 6 through June 25, you could replace the data in the rows for those days, and then ignore results for the other times.

Best regards,
Paul.

I very recently built a workaround for this using PySAM! As well as support for leap days (SAM only supports TMY files). Let me know if you want any advice!

Thank you Matan!

Just one clarification: SAM only supports weather files that contain one year's worth of data, assuming 8,760 hours per year (so no leap day). While this requirement did originate from the convention used for NREL's original TMY weather files, the data in the file is not required to be typical meteorological year (TMY) data.

Best regards,
Paul.

Hello Paul,

Yes sorry, of course. Sorry for miss-speaking. Weather files can be Single year or Typical Meteorological Year right? They just do not include Feb 29th!

For my application we are attempting to use SAM on a daily basis to do daily predictions, so the ability to run the SAM simulations on any day of the year is important ( including Feb 29th)! Also I navigated how to run the simulation on a single day of valid weather data ( rather than a full years worth) by appending null data.

Best,

Matan

Hi Matan,

We are working to make it possible to run pvsamv1 for single time steps which will make it easier to do the kind of analysis you describe. This will be available with the next version of SAM, which we plan to release later this fall:

github.com/NREL/ssc/issues/288

Best regards,
Paul.