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Solar & Wind Atlas — available layers#

The solar-wind-atlas backend ships 16 curated layers across the two atlases. Pick one or more with variables=. Every layer is a static global climatology grid in EPSG:4326.

Global Solar Atlas (download_zip transport)#

Distributed as DEFLATE GeoTIFF ZIP archives (downloaded once, cropped locally). Values are long-term-average daily totals.

variables= id Layer Units
ghi Global horizontal irradiation kWh/m²/day
dni Direct normal irradiation kWh/m²/day
dif Diffuse horizontal irradiation kWh/m²/day
gti Global irradiation, optimally tilted surface kWh/m²/day
pvout Photovoltaic power potential (specific PV output) kWh/kWp/day
opta Optimum tilt of PV modules degree

Global Wind Atlas v3 (vsicurl transport)#

Range-accessible COGs on figshare, read windowed over /vsicurl.

variables= id Layer Units
wind_100m Mean wind speed at 100 m m/s
weibull_k_10m Weibull shape parameter k at 10 m dimensionless
weibull_k_50m Weibull shape parameter k at 50 m dimensionless
weibull_k_100m Weibull shape parameter k at 100 m dimensionless
weibull_k_150m Weibull shape parameter k at 150 m dimensionless
weibull_k_200m Weibull shape parameter k at 200 m dimensionless
capacity_factor_iec1 Turbine capacity factor, IEC Class 1 fraction
capacity_factor_iec2 Turbine capacity factor, IEC Class 2 fraction
capacity_factor_iec3 Turbine capacity factor, IEC Class 3 fraction
air_density_100m Mean air density at 100 m kg/m³

Per-height mean wind speed at 10/50/150/200 m is not published as a public windowable COG (only the 100 m speed is), so it is out of scope for now; the Weibull parameters above let you reconstruct the speed distribution at each height.

Facade aliases#

Four friendly aliases route to the same backend:

  • data_source="global-solar-atlas" / data_source="gsa"
  • data_source="global-wind-atlas" / data_source="gwa"

data_source="solar-wind-atlas" works with any layer id (solar or wind).

Listing the ids programmatically#

from earthlens.solar_wind_atlas import Catalog

catalog = Catalog()
catalog.available()                 # all 16 layer ids, sorted
catalog.get("ghi").atlas            # 'gsa'
catalog.get("ghi").transport        # 'download_zip'
catalog.get("wind_100m").transport  # 'vsicurl'
catalog.get("wind_100m").units      # 'm/s'