I constructed a sky imager (Girasol Machine) with far-infrared and multi-exposure fisheye visible light capabilities, mounted on a solar tracker, so that the Sun remains at the center of the sky images throughout the day. We developed a noise reduction software and an image fusion algorithm to merge fisheye sky images with different exposures, thereby obtaining a low signal-to-noise ratio sky image with a high dynamic range (Terrén-Serrano et al., 2021).
The Girasol dataset is publicly accessible in a Dryad repository. The Girasol dataset is composed of 300 sample days of multi-exposure fisheye visible light and far-infrared sky images and irradiance measurements collected every 15-second resolution in Albuquerque, NM, USA.
References
2021
JOURNAL
Girasol, a sky imaging and global solar irradiance dataset
Guillermo Terrén-Serrano, Adnan Bashir, Trilce Estrada, and 1 more author
The energy available in a microgrid that is powered by solar energy is tightly related to the weather conditions at the moment of generation. A very short-term forecast of solar irradiance provides the microgrid with the capability of automatically controlling the dispatch of energy. We propose a dataset to forecast Global Solar Irradiance (GSI) using a data acquisition system (DAQ) that simultaneously records sky imaging and GSI measurements, with the objective of extracting features from clouds and use them to forecast the power produced by a Photovoltaic (PV) system. The DAQ system is nicknamed the Girasol Machine (Girasol means Sunflower in Spanish). The sky imaging system consists of a longwave infrared (IR) camera and a visible (VI) light camera with a fisheye lens attached to it. The cameras are installed inside a weatherproof enclosure that it is mounted on a solar tracker. The tracker updates its pan and tilt every second using a solar position algorithm to maintain the Sun in the center of the IR and VI images. A pyranometer is situated on a horizontal mount next to the DAQ system to measure GSI. The dataset, composed of IR images, VI images, GSI measurements, and the Sun’s positions, has been tagged with timestamps.
@article{TERRENSERRANO2021106914,title={Girasol, a sky imaging and global solar irradiance dataset},journal={Data in Brief},volume={35},pages={106914},year={2021},issn={2352-3409},doi={https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2021.106914},author={Terrén-Serrano, Guillermo and Bashir, Adnan and Estrada, Trilce and Martínez-Ramón, Manel},keywords={Sky Imaging, Global Solar Irradiance, Fisheye Lens Camera, Long-wave Infrared Camera, Data Acquisition System, Solar Forecasting, Smart Grids, Sun-Tracking},}
