bstach Posted February 8, 2013 Posted February 8, 2013 I had this anecdotal discussion with a colleague of mine recently and its got me very curious. I am interested in getting data on monthly hours of bright sunshine in Vancouver from 1988 to 2013. I know there is someone who posts here that works for environment canada...is this the sort of data that EC could provide? Quote
bstach Posted February 14, 2013 Author Posted February 14, 2013 LMGTFY Perhaps your google-fu is better than mine. Quote
ivan Posted February 14, 2013 Posted February 14, 2013 how would one even measure that? would reckon anyone running a solar panel might be able to look through records of their output over the years, seems like you'd need an awful big # of such folks though to draw much in the way of grand conclusions... would increased cloud cover help cool the earth by reflecting sunlight? or would trapping the air below the clouds offset the advantages of such reflection? Quote
rob Posted February 14, 2013 Posted February 14, 2013 how do you even define cloud cover? I don't think it's a binary deterministic function, like "was it a cloudy today or not," -- probably you'd need a method for measuring the density of clouds, as well as their saturation in the visible sky. Are a few thick clouds worse than a small layer of thin clouds? How near does cloud cover have to be to be included in the model? If you use solar cell output to measure UV, would you want an equal distribution of panels oriented to equal aspects? Probably there are already historical UV records for Vancouver that record UV intensity in a standardized way, but I'm not sure that even tells you anything -- perhaps if you selected UV data by season, and then pivot on each season's daily UV acerage to determine outliers in the model you could deduce which days were low UV due to cloud cover and which days were simply low UV due to it being winter. However, theoretically I suppose you could have a really cloudy half-day followed by a cloudless afternoon in winter that would look the same as a medium cloud-cover day with no sun breaks -- but I guess that would just average out, right? Quote
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