Real-Time Global Computation of the Solar Position in Google Earth Engine

Real-Time Global Computation of the Solar Position in Google Earth Engine

October 11, 2022

Description: Information about the solar position at a given date and time is crucial for e.g. photovoltaic systems and numerous environmental analyses. For this purpose I created the “GlobalSolarPosition” module which enables global computation and visualization of solar position, both with and without respect to the surface slope and aspect in Google Earth Engine. Users can either incorperate the respective functions in their scripts or use the interactive GEE Application.

The calculations of the solar zenith and azimuth angles are based on the following equations. The angles are computed for a given local time with respect to the present time zone based on the Natural Earth time zones dataset.

Access: The code to the functions, example scripts, as well as an interactive Google Earth Engine Application can be accessed via the GlobalSolarPosition GitHub repository.

Citation: Philipp, M. (2022): GobalSolarPosition V.1.0. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7139847.

follow us and share it on:

you may also like:

Mapping Lava Tubes on Mauritius with iPhone Pro LiDAR

Mapping Lava Tubes on Mauritius with iPhone Pro LiDAR

Lava tube structures on Mauritius are quite hard to survey - tight, dark, and largely inaccessible to classical scanning equipment. As part of ongoing research by Dr. Kim Lea Holzmann (Chair of Animal Ecology and Tropical Biology, University of Würzburg), we're...

Johannes Mast wins Bernd Rendel Prize

Johannes Mast wins Bernd Rendel Prize

Johannes Mast is awarded the 2026 Bernd Rendel Prize for Geosciences by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for outstanding research as part of his dissertation. Johannes’s highly interdisciplinary work bridges the Geosciences, Linguistics, Data Science, and...

Two days of celebration, and a hundred hands behind it

Two days of celebration, and a hundred hands behind it

We've written plenty about the EORC 25th and EAGLE 10th anniversary already, the timeline, the talks, the EAGLE panel discussion, the exhibition. But there's a story we haven't told yet, and it's honestly the one that matters at least as much. Because none of it just...

Small Gesture, Big Thanks: Chocolate in the Polar Bear Kitchen

Small Gesture, Big Thanks: Chocolate in the Polar Bear Kitchen

Pulling off a party for 250 people doesn't happen by magic. It happens because a bunch of people quietly say yes to the boring jobs, the carrying, the setting up, the standing around answering questions, the cleaning up afterward. Our combined 25th anniversary for...

Share This