Kriging for NSRDB PSM version 3 satellite-derived solar irradiance

The National Solar Radiation Database (NSRDB) has provided solar resource data for over 25 years. Its most recent update, namely, physical solar model (PSM) version 3, generates half-hourly, gridded, satellite-derived irradiance data with a spatial resolution of 4 km × 4 km, covering most of America. The total volume of the data is over 40 TB. Since the main method to access the data is using API with a daily limit of 2000 requests, it would require 1000 days to obtain one year of PSM data from approximately 2 million pixels. Furthermore, such a big dataset is difficult to store and manipulate. In this regard, this paper empirically investigates the accuracies of various kriging methods, so that a suitable, dimension-reduced (in space) dataset can be opted during various spatio-temporal analyses, such as forecasting or monitoring network design.