Week 2 Lab: Solar Radiation   

Week 2 Lab: Solar Radiation   

This lab will help you find and interpret insolation data. Also use this lab as a guide to collect the required insolation data for your Research Project. As you have learned this week, insolation is “the single energy input driving the Earth-atmosphere system.” In this activity you will explore an online solar radiation calculator that contains surface insolation values for major cities in the United States and around the world.

Go to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s PVWatts Calculator at http://ift.tt/2xBvoKE(Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

and the link will open to their new beta site. Since this is a beta site, there may be some changes made to the site so you may have to navigate to the results in a different way than described in the directions below.

To find the surface insolation values for a particular location, simply type in the zipcode, address, or coordinates of your site location in the “Get Started” box and then click on “Go”. For the lab exercise we will be looking at Seattle, Washington and Tucson, Arizona. You will do these steps again to find data for your Research Project area. Click on “Go” once you type in the location information and follow the directions below. To change to a different location click on the “New Location” link that is found in the upper left corner.

The recommended weather data for the location will be indicated under the Solar Resource Data tab. As you can see, you can change the location the weather data is retrieved from by clicking on the “Change” button. However, the recommended site that is automatically provided is the site we will use so no change is needed.

To get to the solar radiation calculation you can either click on the “Results” tab near the top of the page or click on the orange arrow on the right until you get to the results page. In the “Results” table you will see a column for “Solar Radiation” by month.

As you can see, the insolation data in this system is in kWh/m2/day. In other words, the values you see are the daily average kilowatt hours of solar energy received over a square meter. Look carefully at the monthly average values.

Question 1a: Copy the monthly values and the annual average for Seattle, WA into the space below. Make sure to note the month that each value belongs to.

Question 1b: Copy the monthly values and the annual average for Tucson, AZ into the space below. Make sure to note the month that each value belongs to.

Question 2: What pattern(s) do you notice for the two locations? Hopefully, you noticed that insolation input values would look like the expected change in temperatures for your location through the year. What factors control the insolation and temperature patterns for these two locations (i.e., why are they so different)?

Using the map showing insolation at Earth’s surface (in Question 4 below), you will notice that it uses a seemingly similar, but different, unit of measurement (W/m2) than the NREL website. Unfortunately, kWh (kilowatt hours) and W (watts) are actually two different types of measurements (the former is a unit of energy and the latter is a unit of power). Thus, we cannot directly convert the values from the atlas for comparison with those in the diagram. The following company’s website does provide an online calculator that can be used to get an approximate conversion:http://ift.tt/2A2OpYo(Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

. Open a separate browser window and go to this website. Scroll down to the Watt and Energy Calculator and enter your location’s annual average insolation value in the box next to kilowatt hours ( for both Seattle and Tucson). Since this value was a daily average, change the unit of time to “Days” (so the conversion is based on 1 day). The calculator should automatically convert the values into Watts.

Question 3a: Provide the annual average radiation in Watts/meter2 for Seattle, WA.

Question 3b: Provide the annual average radiation in Watts/meter2 for Tucson, AZ.

Using the map showing insolation at Earth’s surface (in Question 6 below), you will notice that it uses a seemingly similar, but different, unit of measurement (W/m2) than the NREL website. Unfortunately, kWh (kilowatt hours) and W (watts) are actually two different types of measurements (the former is a unit of energy and the latter is a unit of power). Thus, we cannot directly convert the values from the atlas for comparison with those in the diagram. The following company’s website does provide an online calculator that can be used to get an approximate conversion:http://ift.tt/2A2OpYo(Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

. Open a separate browser window and go to this website. Scroll down to the Watt and Energy Calculator and enter your location’s annual average insolation value in the box next to kilowatt hours ( for both Seattle and Tucson). Since this value was a daily average, change the unit of time to “Days” (so the conversion is based on 1 day). The calculator should automatically convert the values into Watts.

Question 4: Find the same locations on the insolation diagram shown here. How closely do conversions match the general estimations given for both cities?

Question 5:Research Project Guide: Use these same steps to produce a table that shows the solar radiation values by month for your location (or the nearest city) and add it into your Research Project as a new PowerPoint page. Don’t forget to cite were you retrieved the information. Then briefly discuss this data, in particular, you should state what factors you think are most important in determining the average insolation received at this location. Also discuss why the solar radiation changes from one month to the next (or maybe why there is little change for your location).

NOTE: While you are putting in your insolation data to the Research Project, it would be a good time to add other information needed for the Atmosphere section of your project. Look at the “Research Project Directions” provided in the “Doc Sharing” tab of the eCompanion site to read through these requirements. We have already gone through the albedo information, so you should be able to use what we have learned and diagrams given in the textbook to estimate the average albedo of your location. Make sure to think about what type of ground cover is dominant at your location.  

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