A database of multi-year (2004–2010) quality-assured surface solar hourly irradiation measurements for the Egyptian territory

Abstract

Abstract.A database containing the global and diffuse components of the surface solar hourly irradiation measured from 1 January 2004 to 31 December 2010 at eight stations of the Egyptian Meteorological Authority is presented. For three of these sites (Cairo, Aswan and El-Farafra), the direct component is also available. In addition, a series of meteorological variables including surface pressure, relative humidity, temperature, wind speed and direction is provided at the same hourly resolution at all stations. The details of the experimental sites and instruments used for the acquisition are given. Special attention is paid to the quality of the data and the procedure applied to flag suspicious or erroneous measurements is described in detail. Between 88 and 99 % of the daytime measurements are validated by this quality control. Except at Barrani where the number is lower (13 500), between 20 000 and 29 000 measurements of global and diffuse hourly irradiation are available at all sites for the 7-year period. Similarly, from 9000 to 13 000 measurements of direct hourly irradiation values are provided for the three sites where this component is measured. With its high temporal resolution this consistent irradiation and meteorological database constitutes a reliable source to estimate the potential of solar energy in Egypt. It is also adapted to the study of high-frequency atmospheric processes such as the impact of aerosols on atmospheric radiative transfer. It is planned to update regularly the current 2004-2010 database, which has been placed on the PANGAEA repository (doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.848804) and contains the individual meteorological and irradiation data files of the eight stations.

Downwelling surface solar irradiance in the tropical Atlantic Ocean: a comparison of re-analyses and satellite-derived data sets to PIRATA measurements

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Evaluating meso-scale change in performance of several databases of hourly surface irradiation in South-eastern Arabic Pensinsula

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Monthly solar radiation in the tropical Atlantic Ocean: Can its spatial variations be captured by the current configuration of the PIRATA moorings?

“…Muneer and Fairooz, 2002;Foltz et al, 2014), an additional quality control was performed at MINES ParisTech. The quality control comprises several tests of the 2 min DSIS against extremely rare limits and physically possible limits (Korany et al, 2016). Values falling outside the limits were excluded from the time-series.…”

“…The spatial resolution depends on the pixel position and is approximately 3-4 km in the tropical Atlantic Ocean. The processing method is the Heliosat-2 method (Rigollier et al, 2004;Lefèvre et al, 2007), modified by Qu et al (2014). The method itself, as well as the HC3v5 dataset, have been the subject of several comparisons against measurements of DSIS made at land-based sites, see e.g.…”