Global Solar Atlas

The Global Solar Atlas is provided by the Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP), a multi-donor trust funded program administered by the World Bank, and was developed under contract by Solargis, a provider of solar resource data and photovoltaic (PV) energy evaluation services.

It involves the popular solar resource maps in multiple languages, country fact-sheets and spatial data in a standard GIS formats.

[8][9] The model uses data from five geostationary satellites to calculate the attenuation effect of clouds and additional variables characterising the state of the atmosphere (such as aerosols/atmospheric pollution and water vapour).

The history of 10/15/30-minute time-series of solar irradiance data is aggregated into long-term yearly or monthly averages, representing the climate reference.

[2] Online map-based application:[2] Download section:[2] The Global Solar Atlas website serves over 23,000 users per month according to data from Google Analytics (June 2020).

Global Solar Atlas (GSA v2.2): screenshot of the interactive map interface (status Jun 2020).
Site detail view (in this case for the location Bhadla, Rajasthan, India) summarises the data important for preliminary site assessment of a photovoltaic power plant
Global map of Photovoltaic Power Potential downloadable via the Global Solar Atlas (GSA 2.2)
Download section feature with more than a thousand ready-to-use map images for countries and regions (example of Direct Normal Irradiation (DNI), Zambia)