Knowledge of the solar energy resource is essential for the planning and operation of solar energy systems. In past years there has been substantial European and national funding to develop information systems on solar radiation data, leading to the situations that several data bases exist in parallel, developed by different approaches, various spatial and temporal coverages and resolutions including those exploiting satellite data. The user of these products may end up with different results for the same requested sites. To better guide the users, a benchmarking exercise is under preparation. A set of reference data has been collected and benchmarking measures and rules have been defined. The results of the benchmarking and the feedback from stakeholders will be integrated into a guide of best practices in the application of solar resource knowledge. Access to data has been quite fragmented. Each service has its own way of access to the data and delivery format. A new broker portal based on the experience of the project Soda aims to unify and ease the access to distributed data sources and applications providing solar resource information.

An introduction is given to the use of spectral methods in numerical plasma simulation. As examples of the use of spectral methods, solutions to the two-dimensional Euler equations in both a simple, doubly periodic region, and on an annulus will be shown. In the first case, the solution is expanded in a two-dimensional Fourier series, while a Chebyshev-Fourier expansion is employed in the second case. A new, efficient algorithm for the solution of Poisson's equation on an annulus is introduced. Problems connected to aliasing and to short wavelength noise generated by gradient steepening are discussed.

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