Reporting External Shading Losses

Hello-

Thanks for your help so far exposing SAM's horizon shading functionality. I have a question about reporting the horizon shading loss.

For my purposes, it would be helpful to distinguish horizon shading from self shading. However, it seems like SAM reports only one signal for both external and self shading, 
I see other signals like  that seem to be related to external shading, but it's not obvious to me how one would use this factor to calculate the poa after external shading but before self shading. (I see no signal in the SDK tool for external diffuse shading)

Could you please advise on if it's possible to calculate the exact magnitude of external shading, separate from self shading, from the SAM output? I suppose one could run two simulations, one with external shadings and one without, but I'm hoping there's a more elegant way.

thanks,
Joe

Hi Joe,

Please see the Help topic for SAM's Shading and Layout page for a description of the outputs of the different shading models:

samrepo.nrelcloud.org/help/pv_shading.htm

Best regards,
Paul.