Services for Professionals in Solar Energy and Radiation

The Project SoDa

The project SoDa answers the needs of industry and research for information on solar radiation parameters with a satisfactory quality.

A prototype service has been developed that integrate and efficiently exploits diverse networked information sources to supply value-added information in a selected number of environmental applications.

The project began on January 1st, 2000 and ended in March 2003. You can access the SoDa project fact sheet here.

The project SoDa aims at responding to the strong multi-disciplinary needs for information on solar radiation. It represents a real innovation. Advanced information and communication technologies have been used to supply high quality value-added information that match the actual customer needs. The methodology was user-driven with a large involvement of users in the project. A WWW-based service has been developed and demonstrated which realise the integration of information sources of different natures within a smart network. These sources include databases containing solar radiation parameters and other relevant information, including algorithms and end-users applications; some of them may originate from an advanced processing of remote sensing images. Before the SoDa service was made available, these resources were available separately.

The information sources also include application-specific user-oriented numerical models and advanced algorithms. Algorithms based on innovative techniques in data fusion, data mining, data processing, and data assimilation in numerical models have been developed and tested to supply value-added information on solar radiation. The service has been validated through users trials, and its benefits were assessed. The project SoDa focuses on several applications in environment and connected domains: air quality in cities, vegetation, coastal zones, energy-conscious building design and daylighting, and industrial use of renewable energies.

Providers, outside the Consortium SoDa, are using the SoDa service to disseminate information on solar radiation. One example is the MARS (monitoring agriculture by remote sensing), a component of the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Commission.

A multi-disciplinary consortium has been assembled, gathering companies and researchers with the necessary expertise in solar radiation and information and communications technologies. Customers and potential users were also represented as partners in the consortium via the involvement of commercial vendors of solar radiation databases and of representatives of large international or local environmental research and development programmes.

The objectives of the project SoDa were:

• to answer the needs for high quality customer-tailored information on solar radiation to integrate diverse sources of information presently available separately within a smart integrating network to develop and operate a prototype service, which efficiently exploits this smart network, and which will be used and gauged by selected users to increase the quality of the delivered information through improved modelling of time and space structures of the solar radiation, and improved matching to actual customer needs
• to disseminate the achievements of the project, and assess the sustainability of a permanent commercial service

details presentation (pdf file)

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