HelioClim-1: 21-years of daily values in solar radiation in one-click

Abstract

The HelioClim-1 database offers daily means of surface solar irradiance for the period 1985-2005 and has been created from archives of images of the Meteosat First Generation satellites. Expectations of users regarding access to similar data were carefully analyzed, especially regarding dissemination of and access to data, and were taken at the heart of the design of the database. Efforts were made to deliver time-series spanning over 21 years very rapidly on the Web with a limited number of clicks. The soundness of the approach by MINES ParisTech is now rewarded by the large number of access to HelioClim-1, approximately 400 per workday, and by the number of scientific publications using these data. The Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) has declared HelioClim-1 as a Data Collection of Open Resources for Everyone (GEOSS Data-CORE) in November 2011. A Web processing service (WPS) obeying the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) standard has been developed. Being interoperable, it can be invoked in operational routines, such as those under development in the European funded ENDORSE and MACC projects.