Prospect
Quick estimate of PV site's solar potential
- Improved zoom and map labels for BING satellite map
- Updated UX for map measurement tools
- Fixes to horizon graph
- Fixed bug in snow losses table/graph. Previously -1 value was shown for months with occasional snow.
- Integrated ERA5 data into our historical time series and TMY
- Better temporal consistency of data
- Satellite map replaced with BING satellite map for improved imagery in many regions
- Distance and area measurement tools included in map window
- reCAPTCHA removed for users from China
- PVOUT CSi map layer was updated.
- Performance of application (loading time) was improved
- Compatibility issues with Firefox/Safari browsers were fixed
- Operational aerosol data harmonization was updated for data starting from Jan 2019. Solar radiation data for all regions were re-calculated using updated aerosol data.
- The data harmonization is used to control temporal stability of the input aerosol data coming from various versions of models.
- The biggest changes can be expected for DNI during extreme situations when there was very high or very low AOD (aerosol optical depth). GHI is also affected but to a smaller extent.
Initial release of Prospect app, which will replace iMaps and pvPlanner. Overview of updates and improvements can be seen here: https://solargis.com/blog/product-updates/prospect-launch
- TMY files generated for locations covered by Meteosat PRIME satellite (Europe and Africa) had a small temporal mismatch with time series. The TMY generation srcipts were updated to remove the temporal mismatch.
- Elevation data, used as input for post-processing of meteorological outputs from NWP models (Temperature, Atmospheric Pressure, and Relative humidity) and for calculation of CdTe PV spectral correction, was updated. Previously the main source of elevation data was SRTM3-v2, which had inaccuracies in some islands, coastal regions, and few deserted regions.
- The primary data source for the updated elevation data layer is SRTM-v4.1, which is an improvement over SRTM3-v2, but still, some issues remained.
- Many issues have been fixed by applying patches based on multiple data sources.
Data for Americas has been improved using the first complete year of GOES-R satellite imagery:
- better snow identification and processing in GHI and DNI calculation for period from 1 January 2018
- more info about the use of GOES-R satellite in Solargis model
- IFS forecast was updated with following changes
- Forecast update frequency is 6 hours (before it was 12 hours)
- Temporal resolution for first 48 hours was increased to 1 hour, hour 48-84 remains in 3 hourly resolution
- New region covering east Brazil
