BSRN data set for IEA-PVPS Task-16 Activity 1.4 Quality Control

Abstract:
Ground-based radiation measurements are required for all large solar projects and for evaluating the accuracy of solar radiation models and datasets. Ground data almost always contain low-quality periods caused by instrumental issues, logging errors, or maintenance deficiencies. Therefore, quality control (QC) is needed to detect and eventually flag or exclude such suspicious or erroneous data before any subsequent analysis. The few existing automatic QC methods are not perfect, thus expert visual inspection of the data is still required. In this work, we present a harmonized QC procedure, which is a combination of various available methods, including some that include an expert visual inspection. In the framework of IEA PVPS Task 16, these tests are applied to 161 world stations that are equipped with various radiometer models, including stations from the BSRN between 2015 and 2020, both years including.