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High spatial resolution surface solar radiation dataset Published

Recently, Prof. WANG Kaicun's group at Beijing Normal University published a homogenized high-resolution surface solar radiation dataset for the last 35 years in China at the National Tibetan Plateau/Third Pole Environment Data Center (https://data.tpdc.ac.cn), which is openly available to data users.

Surface solar radiation (Rs) is essential to climate studies. Thanks to long-term records from the Advanced Very High-Resolution Radiometers (AVHRR), the recent release of International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) HXG cloud products provide a promising opportunity for building long-term surface solar radiation data with high resolutions (3 h and 10 km). This dataset uses a geo-weighted regression method to fuse surface solar radiation site data estimated from more than 2000 meteorological stations across China in terms of sunshine duration hours and satellite high-resolution gridded data to generate 0.1º resolution surface solar radiation gridded data from 1983-2017. This dataset is characterized by integration of the high resolution of satellite data and the correction of its long-term trend with station observations, which is suitable for long-term change studies.

Figure 1. Spatial distributions of trends for Rs from 1984 to 2000, 2000 to 2016 and 1984 to 2016. The first line shows the Rs trends from 1984 to 2000 based on SunDu-derived Rs (SunDu Rs), ISCCP-HXG-derived Rs(HXG) and ISCCP-HXGmerged with SunDu-derived Rs(HGWR). The second and third lines show the Rstrends from 1984 to 2016 and 2000 to 2016, respectively.

The research was supported by the China National Key R&D Program (grant no. 2017YFA06036001) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 1525018 and 41930970).

Data available at:

https://data.tpdc.ac.cn/en/data/a82849b0-9af5-457d-8968-4471dd845f2e/

Full-text available at:

https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13040602