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PVsyst SA - Route de la Maison-Carrée 30 - 1242 Satigny - Switzerland

www.pvsyst.com
 INTRODUCTION

This document is a first step of a series of tutorials that demonstrates the use of
PVsyst Version 7 and may be understood as a PVsyst user's manual. In this
chapter, we will be describing how to manage meteorological data in PVsyst.
More tutorials on different features of PVsyst are in preparation and will be
added in the future. The complete reference manual for PVsyst is the online help
that is accessible from the program through the “Help” entries in the menus, by
pressing the F1 key or by clicking on the help icons inside the windows and
dialogs.

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Contents
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................... 2
Contents .................................................................................................................................................. 3
Chapter 3: Meteorological Data Management ...................................................................................... 4
3.1 Introduction to meteorological data management ................................................................ 4
3.1.1 Data organization ................................................................................................................... 4
3.1.2 Opening the meteorological data management options ....................................................... 5
3.2 Geographical sites ................................................................................................................... 7
3.2.1 PVsyst’s built-in database..................................................................................................... 11
3.3 Synthetic data generation ..................................................................................................... 12
3.4 Meteo tables and graphs....................................................................................................... 14
3.4.1 Graphical output................................................................................................................... 15
3.4.2 Tables.................................................................................................................................... 17
3.5 Importing Meteo data from predefined sources .................................................................. 18
3.5.1 Importing PVGIS Data ........................................................................................................... 19
3.6 Importing Meteo data from custom file ............................................................................... 21
3.6.1 Detailed example of importing a custom file ....................................................................... 22
3.7 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 30

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 Chapter 3: Meteorological Data Management
3.1 Introduction to meteorological data management

This tutorial will guide you through the different options to manage and organize meteorological data
in PVsyst and explain the importation of data from external sources.

The meteorological data (short: ‘meteo’ data) are the starting point of the evaluation of a project.
Special care should be taken when importing and generating these data since they represent the main
source of uncertainty for the simulation. We recommend using only data from reliable sources and to
always perform some basic crosschecks on them, as will be explained in this tutorial. This will make
sure that there is no serious mistake that could compromise the quality of the results.

Self-measured data should only be used if the measurements were performed with proper equipment
that has been installed, carefully calibrated and the results analyzed by qualified experts.

3.1.1 Data organization

Input Data

The first input that PVsyst needs is the geographical location. This will determine the sun path over the
year and allow to interpolate meteorological data for places where no direct measurements were
taken.

The meteorological data that is used as input for the simulation consists of the following quantities:

- Horizontal global irradiation (required).

- Average external ambient temperature (required).
- Horizontal diffuse irradiation (optional).
- Wind velocity (optional).

The first two quantities, namely the horizontal global irradiation and average external ambient
temperature must be supplied as inputs to the simulation. There is no good way to estimate them just
from the geographical location.

The other two quantities can either also be supplied as external measured data or, in case there are
no good measurements available, they are estimated by PVsyst with the help of established models.

Synthetic generation of hourly data

The simulation of PVsyst is done in hourly steps over a whole year. The built-in data from Meteonorm
comes in monthly increments. It is therefore necessary to artificially generate the hourly values from
the monthly ones. PVsyst uses special algorithms to generate the hourly values for the meteorological
data. Most of the external data sources provide data directly in hourly values for full years (i.e., TMY
from PVGIS or NSRDB).

*.SIT and *.MET files

PVsyst stores the geographical location together with the monthly meteo data in one file for each site.
These files have the extension ‘.SIT’. You can have more than one file for each site if you have monthly
data from different sources or from different years that you would like to compare. The hourly data is
stored in files with the extension ‘.MET’ and here too you can have more than one file per site to
compare different years or different data sources. If you obtain a ‘.MET’ file without a ‘.SIT’ for the
same coordinates, you can directly export it from ‘Meteo tables and graphs’ by choosing ‘Export site’.

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Data Sources

The built-in meteorological data source of PVsyst is the Meteonorm monthly database. Meteonorm
delivers monthly meteorological data for almost every spot on the globe and PVsyst will use this source
by default if no other is explicitly specified. As a last resort, if Meteonorm returns errors, it is also
possible to choose satellite data from the legacy NASA-SSE. Furthermore, PVsyst has access to several
public sources directly available from the Web like PVGIS, NSRDB among others. Self-measured data
and data from other providers like national meteorological offices may also be imported from text files
(or .csv) using a tool that can be adapted to different data formats.

3.1.2 Opening the meteorological data management options

All manipulations and visualizations of the meteo data are accessed through the "Databases" option
in the main window:

Figure 1: Database option in the main window.

After clicking on this button, the Database Window will pop up on the screen. The left side contains
options related to meteorological data, including the following options:

- Geographical sites: Monthly data management.

- Synthetic data generation: Generate hourly values from the monthly data.
- Meteo tables and graphs: Visualization and crosschecks of the hourly data.
- Compare meteo data: Compare different meteo files.
- Known format: Import meteo data from predefined sources.
- Custom file: Import meteo data with custom format.

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Figure 2: Meteo database options.

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3.2 Geographical sites
The main database is given as objects including the geographical coordinates and associated monthly
meteo data. These objects are stored as files with the name *.SIT, situated in the workspace in the
subfolder \Sites\.

Click on "Geographical sites":

Figure 3: Geographical sites option.

You will get a dialog with a list of choices of the geographical site, where you can choose the country
or region of interest and a given station. The first column is the name of the site, the second column is
the country in which the site is located and the third one describes the source of the monthly
meteorological data.

Figure 4: Options for geographical site.

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To create a new site for a project, click on ‘New’. You will get a window with the geographical site
parameters that contains three tabs:

- Geographical Coordinates.
- Monthly meteo.
- Interactive Map.

Figure 5: Interactive map to choose geographical site.

The "Interactive Map" tab allows you to select interactively the location of your site using Google maps.
You can click on the map to choose the site location. You can zoom in and out of the map, and you can
use the search field to find the name of a place. When the red mark is at the desired place, click on
“Import” to transfer the location to the “Geographical Coordinates” tab.

In case of internet connection problems, you can always define the coordinates and all site information
in the “Geographical Coordinates” tab without using the map.

In the tab "Geographical coordinates" you define:

- Site name: Choose a name for the site of your project

- Country and Region: Normally you do not need to change this
- Geographical Coordinates: The Latitude, Longitude, Altitude (which uniquely define the
(x,y,z) coordinates of a given point of the earth), and the time zone. Ex: for central Europe, the
wintertime corresponds to UTC+1, while the summertime is UTC+2. You can obtain accurate
Latitude/Longitude coordinates from your GPS or Google Earth.

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 Figure 6: Geographical coordinates dialog to define a site.

In this dialog you can also:

- observe the sun paths corresponding to your site,
- import/export the site data with "copy/paste" (for example into or from a spreadsheet like
EXCEL),
- print a complete form with the data of this site.
- If you define a new site (by its geographical coordinates), PVsyst will import by default the data
from METEONORM, which is a reliable source for monthly meteorological data.

Once the monthly data has been imported, the "Monthly meteo" tab (Figure 7) will display the monthly
values. Values for Global irradiance and Temperature are mandatory input for the simulation. Global
diffuse and wind velocity are optional. They will be evaluated by models when necessary.

- Data source: Describe the source of the monthly meteo data, PVsyst will fill this field
when you import the data from a predefined source.
- Irradiation units: You can choose the units in which the global and diffuse irradiation
values are displayed. This is useful to import or compare to data sources that use units
differently from the PVsyst default.
- Data fields: You can edit these values by hand. If data are given as lines or columns
in a spreadsheet, you can "paste" entire columns at a time.

After defining or modifying a site, the program will ask whether you want to keep your modifications,
and if so, it will modify or create a new site in the database (i.e., a new file in the \Sites\ directory).

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 Figure 7: Monthly meteo tab.

Figure 8: Saving the geographical site.

Managing Favorites
The sites will normally have a white background in the selection list. Green entries are sites that
have been defined as favorites by the user. New sites that are created by the user are put into
favorites by default. They can be removed from the list of favorites by clicking on ‘Set Favorites’,
selecting the site from the list and clicking on ‘Close Favorites’. In the same way, you can add more
sites to the list of favorites.

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3.2.1 PVsyst’s built-in database
The built-in site database of PVsyst is based on the METEONORM database, defining about 2'500
"Stations" where measured irradiances on the ground are available.

In Meteonorm, data of all other sites are interpolated between the three nearest stations and satellite
data. For most of the European countries, all the measured stations available in Meteonorm are in the
PVsyst built-in database. But for many other regions of the world, the measured "Stations" are very
scarce and Meteonorm uses satellite data to complete this information.

Besides the built-in database, PVsyst also offers tools to easily import meteo data from many other
sources. This will be described in the “Importing data from predefined sources”chapter.

The year 1990

In PVsyst, we have adopted the convention to label all data which don't correspond to really
measured data at a given time as 1990. This is the case, namely, of all synthetic hourly data or
TMY data files.

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3.3 Synthetic data generation
The simulation process in PVsyst operates on hourly values. If no measured hourly data is available,
PVsyst constructs a set of hourly meteo data from the monthly values. The hourly data will be stored
in *.MET files that reside in the \Meteo\ directory.

For the irradiance, the synthetic generation of hourly values from monthly averages is performed by
using stochastic models that have been developed by the Collares-Pereira team in the 1980's. This
model first generates a sequence of daily values and then a sequence of 24-hourly values per day,
using Markov transition matrices.

For the temperature, there is no model predicting the temperature evolution in terms of the daily
irradiation, as the temperatures are mostly governed by atmospheric circulations. Therefore, the
sequence of daily temperature is mostly random, with constraints on the transition from one day to
the other. Within a day, the temperature profile is well correlated to the irradiance. This results in a
sinusoidal-like shape over 24 h, with an amplitude proportional to the daily irradiation and a phase
shift of around 3 hours with respect to the highest solar angle (the warmest hours are at around 3:00
solar time).

Please note that the generation of the hourly values is a fully random process, two successive
generations performed with the same monthly data will result in different hourly values. When
performing simulations of grid-connected systems, this may produce variations of 0.5 to 1% in the
yearly result.

To generate a synthetic hourly file, head to the “Synthetic data generation” dialog.

Figure 9: Synthetic data generation option.

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First, choose a site holding a monthly meteo data. Now you can specify:

- Site name: This is the site name that will be used in the .MET file. You can name it
differently from the one used in the .SIT file if you want to generate more than one .MET file
for the same site. This site name will be visible if you select a meteo file for your project.
- Source: The source of the data. This is automatically filled in and normally you do not
need to change this. This information will also be visible when you select a meteo file for your
project.
- File name: Select a unique name for a new file or overwrite an existing one.

Press the “Execute Generation” button.

The successful generation of the data is acknowledged by a message

Figure 10: Generation of synthetic hourly meteo values.

There are some options that you will never modify in principle, such as the:

- "Use monthly diffuse": The diffuse part is evaluated using the Liu-Jordan hourly correlation.
At the end of each month, the diffuse values are renormalized in order to match the specified
monthly diffuse.
- Region topology: The temperature model that is used by PVsyst was established using
Swiss data, with a detailed analysis of climate type dependence. It is possible to choose one of
the topology types that are defined for this model, but the differences between all these
options are very small (slight coupling differences between irradiance and amplitude, or
inertial shifts). If you are not sure which option to use, select the PVsyst default “Swiss Plateau,
land, important mist”.

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3.4 Meteo tables and graphs
In PVsyst, the hourly values are stored in *.MET files, that can be found in the \Meteo\ subfolder in
your workspace. To visualize their contents, you must use the button “Meteo Tables and Graphs” in
the "Tools" group.

Figure 11: Meteo tables and graphs option.

The “Meteo Tables and Graphs” dialog will appear on the screen. After choosing a meteo file,
information on the site is shown at the top and the type of data is displayed on the left side of the
dialog.

On the right side, it is possible to select graphical ("Graphs") or table ("Tables") output. Both options
allow you to look at hourly, daily or monthly values. The third tab, “Check data quality” allows you to
perform deeper analysis on the data quality. This step is very important, especially if you imported
data with custom format.

Figure 12: Meteo tables and graphs dialog.

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3.4.1 Graphical output
When the tab “Graphs” is selected you can first select the Graph type:

- Time based: Plots the data values against time.

- Histogram: Plots a distribution of the values.
- Sorted values: Displays all values in decreasing order.

The main preselected variables are:

- Horizontal global irradiance.

- Horizontal diffuse irradiance.

Note that since some of the other options exclude each other you will not be able to select all the
variables at the same time.

Graphs of hourly values

In the "Graph" tab, choose "Time based", "Hourly", "Horiz. Global" and "Horiz. Diffuse" (default
selection) and click the " Show graph" button.

Figure 13: Hourly values graph.

This opens a graph with the hourly meteo values, and you can walk through your entire data using the
Scrollbar on the right. The plot includes a blue line that represents the Clear sky model, superimposed
on your data. It is very important that the data is not shifted on the time axis with respect to the blue
line. This will always be the case for the synthetic data or the data imported from known sources using
the "Import meteo data" tool.

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 Figure 14: Synthetically generated data from monthly values.

However, this may be different for personal data that is imported with the "custom files" tool. If the
data does not match the Clear sky model and are shifted toward morning or evening, this indicates
that the time stamps of the data does not match the PVsyst standard and all the models using solar
geometry will not work properly.

When walking through the year, you will see that clear conditions, where the horizontal global
irradiation matches the clear sky model correspond to a low diffuse component. When the sun
becomes hazy and the horizontal global irradiation is well below the blue line of the clear sky model,
the diffuse part increases. The difference between the global and the diffuse components corresponds
to the beam component.

Figure 15: Monthly values on different day of the year.

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Graphs of daily values
To get a plot with daily values, select “Daily” in the “Values” selection.

Figure 16: Plotting daily values graph.

You will get a scatter plot of the irradiation values against the day of the year. Each point represents
the irradiance for a single day in [kWh/m²/day].

The blue envelope curve describes the Clear sky model. This plot gives a quick crosscheck of the quality
of the data. The Clear sky model is an upper limit for the measured irradiance, and none of the points
should exceed this curve significantly (more than 3-5%). If larger discrepancies are seen, this indicates
that the data are not good.

3.4.2 Tables
You can also present your data as tables. You can choose up to 8 values to be put into the table at the
same time, including the irradiance on a tilted plane (transposition model) or the normal beam
component (for concentration).

As for each data table in PVsyst, you have the possibility to:

Print the table: You will get the Print dialog, where you can add comments to the header of
the table and specify the time range for which you want to print the values.
Export / Copy as text: This will "copy" the full table to the clipboard, from where so you can "Paste"
it directly into an external spreadsheet like MS Excel. Remember that in MS
EXCEL, the imported data will usually be gathered in one single column. To
expand the data to cells you have to use the standard EXCEL options for
importing data: menu “Data” / "Convert…", and here you should choose
“Delimited” / “Semicolon” separator.
NB: The data will be copied with a decimal point. If you are using decimal
commas (international preferences in Windows), you will perhaps have to
change all points to commas.
Export / Copy as image: Will copy a bitmap image of the table to the clipboard, from where you can
paste it into a report.
Export / Copy to file: Will create a CSV file which you can open in any spreadsheet program.
NB: Due to contractual constraints of the METEONORM provider, the
hourly tables of METEONORM data cannot be exported.

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3.5 Importing Meteo data from predefined sources
In PVsyst, it is also possible to import meteorological data from external sources. There is a set of
predefined data sources where importing has been semi-automatized.

To access this option, click the "Known format" button in the Meteo database window.

Figure 17: Importing meteo data from predefined sources.

The “Import Meteo Data” dialog will pop up, giving access to the easy-to-use tools to import meteo
data from predefined sources. If you press F1, you will obtain a detailed description of the available
data sources. After choosing a source, clicking on “Information for importing” button will open the
online help window with detailed procedure to import the data. Please follow it carefully and pay
attention to the messages written in red at the top of the screen throughout your progress.

Figure 18: Import meteo data dialog.

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The data from the different sources are not always completely comparable. The PVsyst online help
includes a comparison of such data for 12 sites from the north to the south of Europe.

The following section contains an example on how to import meteorological data from the PVGIS
project.

3.5.1 Importing PVGIS Data

PVGIS (PhotoVoltaic Geographical Information System) is a research, demonstration and policy-
support instrument for solar energy resource, part of the SOLAREC action at the JRC Renewable
Energies unit of the European Communities (Ispra). You will find a complete description of this project
at https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/pvgis . The PVGIS database covers Europe, Africa, most of Asia, part of
South America, central and North America with data from NSRDB.

Importing PVGIS data is automatic after choosing the coordinates manually of from the map.

Figure 19: Importing PVGIS data – selecting a location.

After setting the coordinates and the rest of the data, click on the “Import” button to obtain a full
timeseries for 10+ years of hourly data. A separate .MET file is created for each year imported.

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 Figure 21: Importing PVGIS data.

When the .MET files have been saved, you can press “Save Site” to save a site with monthly data based
on the average of the timeseries. After saving the site, you can generate a synthetic hourly meteo file
based on the average of the timeseries by pressing the “Synthetic gen.” button. The dialog “Generation
of Synthetic Hourly Meteo Values” will pop up. Click on “Execute Generation” and PVsyst will create
the .MET file with the hourly values based on the monthly averages of the timeseries.

Figure 20: Importing PVGIS data.

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3.6 Importing Meteo data from custom file
If none of the predefined data sources contain satisfactory data for your project or if you have access
to a better data source, you can import this data to PVsyst from custom files.

Please note that measuring and analyzing meteorological data is a complex and difficult task. It is very
easy to get biased or wrong results due to wrong calibration of instruments or inadequate analysis
tools. If you want to use self-measured data, please make sure that it has been measured with adapted
equipment and analyzed by an expert with the necessary skills. Always perform basic crosschecks on
the data as explained in this tutorial. The meteorological data is at the origin of the main uncertainties
of the simulation. Poorly measured or processed data can lead to significant deviations of the results.

To import custom meteorological data, click on “Custom file” in the Database window:

Figure 22: Importing custom file option.

The “Conversion of custom (sub-) hourly meteo files” dialog will pop up.

Figure 23: Custom hourly meteo file dialog.

Carefully follow each step from the conversatiion dialog.

- Choose your source file, which can reside anywhere on your disk.
- Choose an existing site or create a new site to link the resulting .MET file to the correct
coordinates.
- Give a significant name to the internal file to be created. This will identify the file in the meteo
or measured data list boxes. Please carefully choose this title since you will not be able to
change it after conversion.

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 - Choose an existing or create a new format file that will tell how PVsyst must read the file.
- In some cases (depending on the format file), the program will still ask for the beginning date
or the year.

This list is not exhaustive. For detailed instructions, please refer to the online help of PVsyst. When you
are ready, press the "Start Conversion" button.

During execution, a control executing window displays the contents of the source-file's line currently
being processed, as well as the converted meteo values, which will be transcribed on the internal
destination-file. After conversion, you are advised to check your file with the "Tables and Graphs" tool
(either for meteo or for measured data files), and carefully check the time shift of your data.

3.6.1 Detailed example of importing a custom file

For this example, we will use the file “METEO_PVsyst_Standard_Geneva_GPI.csv” that can be found in
the PVsyst workspace under “Templates” (if missing, “Manage” your workspace and press “Reload
templates”). The file contains meteorological data for the year 2006 in hourly steps for Geneva in
Switzerland. There are several quantities stored in this file, among which there is the ambient
temperature and the Global irradiance measured on a plane with a tilt of 30°. These two are the values
that we will be using in the present example.

After opening “Databases” in the main PVsyst window and selecting “Custom file”, you will get the
“Conversion of custom (sub-) hourly meteo files” dialog, which is divided into four fields:

- Data Source.
- Hourly file to be created.
- Conversion.
- Info – Warning.

We will go through the first three fields in detail. The “Info – Warning” field will give you information
and hints to guide you through the different steps that are required to import the data successfully.

Data Source

When you import meteorological data, you will take an existing text file with the data and create a
new file in the PVsyst format with hourly meteorological values. This file will be of type *.MET and it
will be associated to the site that you select in “Data Source”. You can have several files with hourly
values associated to the same site. Make sure that you have already created the site to which you want
to attach the *.MET file that will be created.

In the dialog click on “Choose”. A file selection dialog will pop up where you can search for the data
file. The default filter will display files of type *.DAT, *.TXT and *.CSV.

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 Figure 25: Choosing the data.

Once you have selected the file, you specify a site for this data. To select the site, you first select a
country or region to narrow down the choices in the “Site” drop down list.

Figure 24: Specifying a site for the data.

Next you give a small description of the data that will be attached to the output file. This information
will be displayed in PVsyst in dialogs or reports as description of the Meteo file (*.MET file).

Figure 26: Description of the data.

You have three fields for which PVsyst proposes default values and that you can complete or change
to any text you want. It is recommended to give short descriptions, so that they will fit into the dialog
fields. The three fields are:

- Site: The default will be the site name chosen in “Data Source”, but you can change or
complete the name in this field.
- Source: Here, you should put a short label describing from where the data has been retrieved,
e.g., the source filename, or “Measured on site”, or “Provided by Meteo Inc.”, etc.
- Year/kind: Default is “imported”. Give a short label with the year for which this data is
valid, and if it is hourly, daily or even sub-hourly data. Try not to exceed the visible width of
the field, so you can read this label easily in other PVsyst dialogs.

You can specify the output filename. PVsyst proposes a filename generated from the site name in the
“Data Source” field. If your source file contains several data sets for the same site, like for different
years or measurements in the horizontal and tilted plane, you are advised to change the output
filename to something that will identify which portion of the data is being imported.

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Define the data format

You need to tell PVsyst what kind of data will be imported from the text file and where to find the data
fields in the file. This information will be stored in an internal PVsyst file of type *.MEF, stored in
\Meteo\. You can create as many of these format protocol files as you like.

Figure 27: Defining the data format.

The dialog “Conversion of custom (sub) hourly meteo files – definition of the import format file” will
pop up. It contains a field “Format description” where you must give a name that will identify this
format protocol. The dialog contains four different tabs, “General”, “Date Format”, “Meteo Variables”
and “Chaining files”. We will investigate the first three tabs in detail. The last tab, “Chaining files”, is
needed if your data is distributed among several files and will not be described in this example. The
lower part of the dialog gives visual feedback on how the format file that is being defined will apply to
the content of the data source file. Here, you can quickly check if the different values have been
selected properly or if there are problems with the format definition.

Figure 28: Conversion of custom meteo files dialog.

“General”
For the example file containing hourly data, you can leave the default selection “(Sub)-hourly data”
with a time step of 60 min. The demo file also uses the default separator, which is a semicolon. In the
lower part of the window, you can check that the columns containing the data starting from line 20 of
the file. Therefore, in the field “Number of headlines to be skipped”, enter 19. In the bottom display,
the background of the skipped lines will now turn yellow and you can check that the first line with
white background is also the first line containing data.

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 Figure 29: Conversion of custom meteo files dialog - General tab.

“Date Format”
In this tab you specify how to read the time of your file. If possible, it is always better to select “Dates
read on the file” to read the time, the other options “Reference year” and “Sequential dates” are very
sensitive: any missing line of data introduces a time shift for all remaining lines of data. For our
example, you need to select “Dates read on the file” and choose the adequate format from the drop-
down list “Date format”. In this case it is “DD/MM/YY/hh/mm”, which means that the date is ordered
as Day/Month/Year/hour/minute, and that date and time are not in separate columns. The slashes are
wildcards and represent any non-numeric character except for the column separators.

On the right, in the column “Field no”, specify the column where the timestamp can be found, which
is “1” in our example. In the bottom part of the dialog, you will see a green header for the specified
column. Finally, you need to specify how the time label is related to the measurements. In our example,
the time labels correspond to the end of the measurement.

Time Labels
In PVsyst, any hourly value with a time stamp should be representative for the hour that follows
the moment given by the time stamp. Thus, if for example the irradiance is measured and
averaged over an hour, and then labelled with a timestamp corresponding to the end or middle
of this interval, this will lead to a time shift.

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 Figure 30: Conversion of custom meteo files dialog - Date tab.

“Variables” selection
For the example, you need to select “Global on tilted plane” and “Ambient temperature” in the right
list. For each selected variable, the column for “Field no” in which the variable can be found in the file
must be filled. In our example, these are the columns 3 for the Irradiance and 4 for the temperature.
The default units for these variables are W/m2 and °C respectively. If the data comes in different units,
you have the possibility to specify a factor which will be multiplied to the values. In our example file,
the units correspond to the default values and we can leave 1.000 as factor. Once you have specified
a field number for a variable, you will see that the corresponding column in the bottom part of the
dialog gets a green header with the variable name. This allows to quickly verify if the given values are
correct.

“Variables”
Since the measurements are for an inclined plane, you must specify tilt and azimuth of the plane in the
“Variables” tab. In the field “Plane orientation”, enter 30° for the tilt and leave the azimuth at zero
(south). Note that this field will only be present if a variable for an inclined plane has been selected in
the right part of the dialog.

When all the specifications of the format file have been entered, define a proper description and file
name then click on “OK” and you will be asked to save the newly defined format file. You can change
a last time the filename before clicking on “Save”. If a file with the same name already exists, you will
be asked to confirm to overwrite it.

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 Figure 31: Conversion of custom meteo files dialog - Variables tab.

After successfully saving the format file you will get back to the “Conversion of custom meteo (sub)-
hourly files” dialog.

You can now click on “Start Conversion” to import the data from the custom file.

Figure 32: Start conversion to import data from custom file.

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In the example file, the timestamp in the last line of data is already the first hour of the following year
(2007). You will be prompted with a corresponding warning message that you acknowledge by clicking
on “Yes”. When the conversion is finished, click on “OK”.

The conversion is now finished, you should carefully check if the result does not contain any obvious
error or inconsistency. A prompt asking if you want to open the dialog for visualizing the
meteorological data will pop up. Click on “Yes” to open the dialog.

Figure 33: Conversion information dialog.

Check the imported data

You should always perform some basic checks on the meteorological data that you want to use for a
simulation of a PV installation. PVsyst offers a variety of tools to do this, for instance the “Meteo tables
and graphs” dialog will pop up when you select “Yes” in the final prompt after importing a custom file
as described in the previous paragraph.

Figure 34: Meteo tables and graphs dialog.

The upper part of the dialog indicates two fields: “Source” and “Kind/Year”, that you filled up when
creating the file. Below them, there is detailed information on the site to which this meteo file has
been associated.

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On the left, you will see the time range covered by the data and some of the details of the original file
from which the data was imported and that you defined in the format file.

The right side of the dialog contains the options to visualize the meteorological data and is subdivided
into three tabs. Select the “Check data quality” tab. The tab contains a small control plot displaying the
time shift that PVsyst estimates for the imported data. In the current example, it should be close to
zero.

There are two more ways to visualize a possible time shift from the data. The first one is to look at the
clearness index for morning and afternoon hours. The orange dots show the clearness index as a
function of the sun height in the morning, while the green dots show the same information for times
after 12:00. Both colors should follow roughly the same distribution.

The second possibility is to compare the daily evolution of the measured irradiation (global and diffuse)
to the clear sky model. If you press on the button “Monthly best clear days”, you will get a plot like as
presented in Figure 35.

PVsyst selects for each month of the year, the day that fits best to the clear sky model. You can scroll
through these 12 plots with the scrollbar on the right. You should see no significant horizontal shift
between the measured data in black and the clear sky model in blue.

Figure 35: Clearness index and monthly best clear day.

The third control plot “Best clear days Ktcs” displays the sorted Ktcs of all days of the year. The Ktcs is
the clearness index referenced to the clear day model (not to the extraterrestrial). This graph gives an
idea of the calibration of the irradiance sensor: the best days of the data should be close (within 5%)
of the clear sky model, i.e., Ktcs=1.

Figure 36: Clearness index with respect to clear sky model plot.

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3.7 Conclusion

In this document, we presented the meteorological data management, starting from an introduction
on the data organization and its options, followed by the presentation of built-in database according
to geographical sites, synthetic data generation, meteo table and graphs and importing meteo data
from predefined sources or custom files.

The next chapter consist of a presentation on how to manage different components such as PV
modules and inverters in PVsyst.

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