Call actual meteorological year from SAM API

Hello,
I'm a brand new user to the SAM API, trying to figure out the simplest way to do a PVWatts calculation based on actual meteorological year (AMY) data from, e.g., 2019, as opposed to using the gridded TMY data. I see the SAM API has a "dataset" field that has the options "nsrdb", "tmy2", "tmy3", "intl". It looks like "nsrdb" is the gridded TMY. However, I don't see an option to specify a particular year, and get that directly from the NSRDB within a single SAM API call. Do I need to separately download the weather data from the NSRDB API, and then run SAM using a different method (like PySAM) than the API? Thanks for your help!

Hi Kate,

I assume that by "SAM API," you mean that you are running SSC from code you have written in Python or some other language using the SAM SDK tools .

Yes, you can make a separate API call to the NSRDB API to get the weather file you need, and then run the simulation using that weather file.

If you are using the PySAM Python package, you can use FetchResourceFiles() described in the Tools section of the documentation to download the weather file, and then run the pvwattsv8 module with data from that file.

Best regards,
Paul.