Solar Atlas for the Mediterranean

Abstract

The solar resource is the "fuel" of solar energy applications and its availability is a key economic parameter in system design. Even though the southern and eastern Mediterranean region is served by several commercial data providers, in a public domain, so far only coarse resolution (100 km) data or data with limited temporal coverage is available. For more rapid development of policies and to attract the industrial interest in this region a more enhanced and easy to access free information is needed. The project will bring high resolution (1 km), long term coverage of at least 15 years data on the available solar resources for the region covering the countries Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Mauretania, Morocco, Palestine National Authority, Syria, Tunisia, and Turkey. The resource data will be derived from Earth Observation satellite data, based on published and transparent methodologies and the data will be validated with existing ground measurements in the region. The database will be provided by SOLEMI and Helioclim-3 (SoDa) sources - Global Horizontal Irradiation (GHI) and Direct Normal Irradiation (DNI). The data will be made available via a distributed information system which will ensure the ease of access to the data. The free access to the data will include historical, annual and monthly averages, and more detailed data products and services will remain the domain of commercial data providers.