Focus Solar

The pictures below show last year's solar energy yield on a horizontal surface. The unit is kWh per square meter. All maps are shown in Mercator projection.

Scale: 900 - 2600 kWh/m2

Data are currently not available in the region of the black triangle.






The most beautiful solar energy map is that of Hawaii expressing a tremendous variation in solar intensity.

The following pictures provide zooms into metropolitan areas. These maps are made for better visibility of microclimates. The West Coast generally has more solar energy than the East Coast, but there is also significantly more variation in the coastal zone on the Pacific side than there is on the Atlantic side. San Francisco, for example, has a microclimate with a local minimum of solar energy. Yet just a few miles south, in Silicon Valley, solar energy is more readily available, and the situation is even better 40 miles away from the coast. The coastal variation is most pronounced in the Los Angeles region where the distribution of solar energy varies up to 30% over a distance of 40 miles.

The monthly maps display the typical (or average) daily solar energy in a month falling on a horizontal surface. The unit is kWh per square meter per day. If you read a value of 5 in the map it means, that on average, in this month the solar energy accumulated over one day was 5 kWh/m2. Just click on the year you are interested in and watch the slide show of monthly solar energy maps!

Year 2007         Year 2008

Scale: 0 - 12 kWh/m2/day

Our solar energy products have developed out of many years of experience from the Energy Meteorology Department at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. In particular we would like to thank Elke Lorenz and Annette Hammer for their continued support, stimulating scientific discussions, and warm atmosphere at their Oldenburg group. The group has made important contributions to the new field of energy meteorology. Furthermore we received excellent support from our international colleagues. We gratefully acknowledge NOAA's CLASS help desk, Richard Perez and Marek Kmiecik of the University of Albany, NY, the National Geophysical Data Center and the National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center.