Gueymard, Christian A; Bright, Jamie M; Sun, Xixi; Augustine, John; Baika, Sidi; Brunier, Laurent; Colle, Sergio; Cuevas-Agulló, Emilio; Dehara, Kohshiro; Denn, Fred M; Duprat, Thierry; Haeffelin, Martial; Kallis, Ain; Knap, Wouter; Kustov, Vasilii; Lupi, Angelo; Maturilli, Marion; Ntsangwane, Lucky; Ogihara, Hiroyuki; Olano, Xabier; Omori, Masao; Pereira, Enio Bueno; Ramanathan, Karthik; Schmithüsen, Holger; Tully, Matt; Vogt, Roland; Vuilleumier, Laurent (2022): BSRN data set for IEA-PVPS Task-16 Activity 1.4 Quality Control [dataset]. PANGAEA, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.939988

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.

Please note: in periods, where GHI was missing the GHI was calculated from the DNI and DIF via the sza

The csds is a flag whether or not there was a clear line of sight to the sun at the time of measurement (1 no; 0 yes)

The csdc is a flag whether or not the sky at the time of measurement was free of clouds (1 no; 0 yes)

Csds and csdc are residuals of a pre-processing of one evaluator and stem from the Bright-Sun model (doi:10.1016/j.rser.2020.110087, doi:10.1016/j.rser.2020.109706).