CAMS Radiation Service

A   Service

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The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) solar radiation service provides historical values (2004 to present) of global (GHI), direct (BHI) and diffuse (DHI) solar irradiation, as well as direct normal irradiation (BNI). The aim is to fulfil the needs of European and national policy development and the requirements of both commercial and public downstream services, e.g. for planning, monitoring, efficiency improvements and the integration of solar energy systems into energy supply grids.

Since the high-resolution cloud information is directly inferred from satellite observations, these data are currently only available inside the field-of-view of the Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) and the Himawari satellites, which is roughly Europe, Africa, part of South America, the Atlantic Ocean, the Middle East, part of Asia, and Australia.

Data is offered in both ASCII and netCDF formats, with a time step from 1 minute to 1 month.

Additionally, an ASCII "expert mode" format can be selected which contains in addition to the irradiation, all the input data used in their calculation (aerosol optical properties, water vapour concentration, etc). This additional information is only meaningful in the time frame at which the calculation is performed and so is only available at 1-minute time steps in universal time (UT).

The CAMS Radiation Service is limited to 100 requests per day. As the time of on-the-fly computations is quite high, this limitation prevents our servers from overload, which would endanger the SoDa Service as a whole. Please be aware that any abuse will automatically result in the desactivation of your SoDa account credentials.

Licence terms

to download a volume of CAMS radiation and CAMS McClear over Meteosat and Himawari fields of view

		Official documentation >
		Some tips and tricks to handle the data >