SOLEMI: A new satellite-based service for high-resolution and precision solar radiation data for Europe, Africa and Asia

Abstract – Solar Energy Mining (SOLEMI) is a new service set up by the DLR (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt) providing high-quality irradiance data for the solar energy community. The service is mainly based on Meteosat-data, from which solar radiation maps with a nominal resolution of 5 km and hourly time-series can be derived for almost half of the Earth's surface: the field of view given by Meteo-sat-7 placed at 0 ° longitude and additionally Meteosat-5 placed at 63°E over the Indian Ocean is pro-vided. Thus, for the first time high-resolution radiation data become available for most parts of Asia. Fast access to the complete Meteosat-7 region at full resolution is also a novelty. Besides Europe, this now of-fers access to solar radiation data all over Africa and also the Northeast of Brazil. Different to other schemes for derivation of solar radiation from Meteosat the cloud detection scheme of SOLEMI makes use of the visible and the infrared channel. Modeling of the daily variation of the background brightness temperature improves detection of thin cirrus clouds, which are hard to recognize in the visible channel. SOLEMI will provide operational access to quality-controlled homogenized long-term time-series of large regions within the view of both satellites. This is achieved by user-optimized storing of the data in a fast mass archive. 1