Today we are launching a new model for Renewables.ninja which delivers raw weather data, such as temperature, rainfall and cloud cover. This works in the same ways as the wind farm and solar PV simulations: you can download weather data for a specific location with our point-and-click map, or you can select ‘Country’ mode to download pre-made datasets.
Eight weather variables are available in this initial release: temperature, rainfall, snowfall, snow depth, air density, solar irradiance (at the top & bottom of the atmosphere) and cloud cover. If you would like to see other weather variables included in future, please let us know in the community forum. These variables come from NASA's MERRA-2 global reanalysis, and we have converted them to more user-friendly variables (e.g. would you prefer kgm-2s-1 of rainfall, or mm per hour?).
We have pre-made datasets for the whole world, covering 154 countries and 170 sub-national regions*. These data are available in two forms: averages weighted by land area or weighted by population density. Larger countries have been seperated into smaller regions:
| Country | Regions |
|---|---|
| USA | 50 states + DC |
| Canada | 13 provinces + territories |
| Australia | 9 states + territories |
| Brazil | 26 states + Brasília |
| Russia | 7 federal districts |
| India | 35 states + territories |
| China | 31 provinces, municipalities + other regions |
* Just to be careful: We remain neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and boundaries. We provide data according to the divisions in the Natural Earth dataset, at least for those countries which did not crash our processing pipeline!
In the near future we will release data for Europe split into the NUTS administrative regions.
If you have any problems running the weather simulations or you have any other questions, then come and talk to us in the community forum.
We hope you find this data useful in your research!
Update: this release also includes a revised version of the GSEE model with a minor fix for negative irradiance values during very low sun angles. This leads to a small discrepancy (~0.1%) in PV electricity generation and irradiance when comparing current PV API results with results generated prior to 30th March. The static (country-aggregated) downloads are not affected by this change.
Renewables