Workplan and Annex: Solar Resource Knowledge Management

'Solar Resource Knowledge Management' will be a new task under the International Energy Agency's Solar Heating and Cooling Programme. The task development has involved researchers from Germany, France, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Canada, the U.S. that have been engaged in the use of satellite imagery to develop solar resource maps and datasets around the world. The task will addressthree major areas: 1) 'Benchmarking' of satellite-based solar resource methods so that resource information derived from approaches developed in one country or based on a specific satellite can be quantitatively intercompared with methods from other countries using different satellites, as well as with ground data; 2) Data archiving and dissemination procedures, especially focusing on access tothe data by end users; and 3) basic R&D for improving the reliability and usability of the data, and for examining new types of products important to the solar industry, such as solar resource forecasts.