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In addition to the Meteo Database included in PVsyst, there are many meteorological data sources available from the Web or by other means. PVsyst includes a tool for easily importing the most popular ones. These are summarized in the tables below, and we have performed a comparison between their results.

Sources of Meteo data, in hourly values

•Vaisala (previously 3Tier) provides hourly data measured by satellites, recent, for any location on the earth. Paid service.

•Explorador Solar provides hourly data measured by satellites,for Chile, in the form of time series of the 2004-2016 period and also TMY. For free.

•Meteonorm hourly values are not measured, but synthetic data constructed in the same way as the synthetic hourly values in PVsyst from monthly values.

•NREL's National Solar Radiation Database provides Typical Meteorological Year files which are compilations of measured hourly data chosen among  1961-1990 (TMY2) or 1991-2005 (TMY3), for 1020 locations in the US. This USTMY2/3 format is also a standard used for other kinds data, used for example as input for the SAM software  (Solar Advisor Model).

•NREL's for India provides data for India, for the 2002-2011 time period coverage, in TMY3 format.

•NREL's NSRDB Data Viewer provides Typical Meteorological Year files which are compilations of measured hourly data and (sub-)hourly time series from 1998-2016 for PSMv3 and 2000-2014 for Suny. The files provided are in SAM CSV file format.

•PVGIS_v5 provides Typical Meteorological Years for geographical location around the world with data from CM-SAF, SARAH and NSRDB. Available at geographical site creation.

•ReuniWatt provides hourly data measured by satellites, recent, for any location on the earth. Paid service.

•Soda-Helioclim provides data in hourly values, measured by METEOSAT, since February 2004. But these data are not free. Files usually provided in PVsyst standard format.

•SolarAnywhere® provides bankable solar resource data for project finance. Available for specific sites on a 1 km x 1 km or 10 km x 10 km basis from 1998 to the present hour depending on geographic availability.

•SolarGis provides hourly data measured by satellites, recent, for any location on the earth. Paid service.

•SolarProspector, now decommissioned, was providing hourly values, including ambient temperature, for any location in the USA, for free. PVsyst still allows the processing of Solar Prospector files.

•Vortex Solar provides hourly data measured by satellites, recent, for any location on the earth. Paid service.
 

... and in monthly values

•Meteonorm monthly irradiance data are available for about 1'200 "stations", as averages of 1960-1991 (and also 1981- 2000 in version 6.1). All "stations" (i.e. with irradiance measurements) of the main European countries are referenced in the PVsyst database. Data for any other site may be obtained by interpolation (usually between the 3 nearest "stations").

•NASA-SSE Data  (Surface Meteorological and Solar Energy Programme) hold satellite monthly data for a grid of 1°x1° (111 km) covering the whole world, for a 10 years period (1983-1993).

•Solargis provides also monthly data measured by satellites, recent, for any location on the earth. For pay.

 

Summary of sources in Hourly values

 

Summary of meteo sources in Monthly values

NB: All these monthly data are imported as geographical sites files *.SIT,  and will require the construction of Synthetic Generated hourly data files for being used in the simulation.

NB: Monthly values are often given as averages over several years.

But due to the variability, it doesn't make sense to average meteorological data in Daily or Hourly values. Such data are always issued from real measurements at a given site (or eventually from satellite photographies).

In the same way, it is also not reliable to interpolate hourly values between different sites.