Which meteo data are available in PVsyst ?

[André Mermoud]

The Meteonorm program (V7.1, fully included in PVsyst V6) holds measured meteo data for about 1'500 sites in the world, named "Stations" (10-30 years monthly averages, in the range 1980-2010).

But it allows also to get meteo data for any location on the earth, either by interpolation (between the 3 nearest stations), or on the basis of satellite data when no sufficiently near site is available.

The "native" database present in PVsyst is based on these 1'500 Meteonorm measuring "stations".

However in the PVsyst "Databases > Geographical sites" option, you can choose any location on a google map (or simply by specifying the coordinates), and get meteo data for this location either from Meteonorm or from the NASA-SSE database. Please see the post below for the procedure.

Therefore even if you don't see your country in the database list, it will be present after you will have defined a site for your location.

Now you have tools in the software for easily importing data from many well-known irradiation databases:

Meteonorm (whole earth), Satellight (Europe), PVGIS (Europe and Africa), Nasa-SSE (whole earth), Soda-Helioclim, Retscreen, NREL TMY3 or SolarAnywhere(SUNY) in the US, EPW in Canada, NREL(TMY3) for India, etc.

For this, please open "Databases" / "Import Meteo Data", choose the source, and press F1 for more details in the Help, a description of each source and the procedure for importing them.

If you can obtain climate data from your Meteorological Service, of if you have your own measured data, you have also a general tool for importing data from almost any ASCII (text) file.

Now there are several companies which distribute Satellite recent data for anywhere on the earth: e.g. SolarGIS, Helioclim-SoDa, 3Tiers, Vortex . They avail of recent data in hourly values, but this is for pay.

You can also import these data readily into PVsyst using "Databases" / "Import Meteo data".

NB: when you have Meteo data in Monthly values, you have to generate a synthetic hourly file for using them in the simulation.

[Nils Lang]

In addition to a predefined list of locations, PVsyst allows you to import and use meteorological data from any location on earth. Here is a simple procedure showing how to add any location to the predefined list of Meteonorm stations:

1. From PVsyst main, select buttons

2. Select button and enter your location in the search bar

3. Select the button to import geographical data from the map

4. Select the button to import meteorological data from Meteonorm database

5. Finally, select the button and save the files of your new location

6. Your new location is now visible in the list.