Automated Solar Data Quality Reporting Framework

Ensuring the collection and maintenance of high-quality solar data is essential for solar research and applications. The software provided with commercial data logging hardware, however, is generally limited to some basic data display and processing, usually just converting raw values to irradiance and doing simple averaging, and although this might suffice for a basic visualisation of data, it quickly proves inconvenient for advanced data analysis, such as assessing data quality, which requires calculations that may not be possible to incorporate in the provided software. This work presents a workflow that automates the periodic (daily, or configurable to other periods) assessment of the quality of solar irradiance measurements taken at 1-minute resolution; with a relatively simple set of scripts and freely available software, collected data are automatically analysed to produce a clear single-page report for each monitoring station, whether for one or several sites. All reports of one day are combined in one PDF file that is emailed to designated addresses.