Unconventional renewable energy sources, as a rule, are characterized by low density and temporal instability, which make it difficult to create efficient energy devices, since they necessitate the construction of larger primary energy receivers, as well as the use of energy accumulators. For such installations, the approach used in the calculation of traditional power plants, based on the choice of the so-called “design mode”, focused on the nominal or extreme conditions of their operation, is unacceptable. The design of economically viable NRES power plants operating in purely variable modes should be based on the calculation of energy generation by these plants in a wide range of changing mode parameters. In this situation, the reliability of the initial data on the intensity of solar and wind energy flows is one of the determining factors in the effectiveness of the development and practical use of solar and wind power plants. For Russia, with its vast territory and a wide range of climatic zones, a reliable assessment of the potential of solar and wind energy in a particular geographic area is an extremely important task, and this requires data on the flux densities of solar radiation arriving on surfaces of different orientations, ambient temperature and humidity. , wind speed. Such data are available from the NASA SSE satellite climatological database developed as a result of several international projects and available at http://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/sse/.
Despite the fact that the NASA SSE database has an exhaustive array of information, “pointwise” (for each geographical point under consideration) access to it is inconvenient when performing RES resource assessments that require calculations for vast regions. The English-language interface used by NASA SSE and the need for remote access make it difficult to use it in the educational process. A serious technical problem is also the verification and conversion of large data sets into formats convenient for building maps and preparing initial data for numerical modeling. These problems determined the creation of a local database based on NASA SSE data containing climate information for various regions of Russia, including data on solar radiation on fixed surfaces differently oriented in space and on a surface following the Sun, on wind speeds at heights of 10 and 50 m , by ambient temperature and by relative air humidity for cells of the territory with dimensions of 1º × 1º of latitude and longitude, as well as long-term averaged data of specific weather stations.
The local database contains information on 3959 geographic points in Russia, obtained from the NASA SSE satellite observation database version 6.0, as well as available information on ground-based measurements of climatic parameters from the RETScreen International database.
The last array, in addition to the actual data of ground-based measurements corresponding to the values of the parameters available in climate reference books, also contains data from NASA SSE satellite observations for quantities for which there are no ground-based measurements. The local database is a software package with a volume of 180 megabytes.
The user manual can be downloaded HERE, a link to the distribution kit is sent upon request to info@gisre.ru.
