IEC TS 62862-1-3:2017

IEC TS 62862-1-3 ®
Edition 1.0 2017-11
TECHNICAL
SPECIFICATION
Solar thermal electric plants –
Part 1-3: General – Data format for meteorological data sets
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IEC TS 62862-1-3 ®
Edition 1.0 2017-11
TECHNICAL
SPECIFICATION
Solar thermal electric plants –

Part 1-3: General – Data format for meteorological data sets

INTERNATIONAL
ELECTROTECHNICAL
COMMISSION
ICS 27.160 ISBN 978-2-8322-4976-5

– 2 – IEC TS 62862-1-3:2017 © IEC 2017
CONTENTS
FOREWORD . 3
1 Scope . 5
2 Normative references . 5
3 Terms and definitions . 5
4 Format description . 5
5 General conventions . 6
5.1 Character set . 6
5.2 New line . 6
5.3 Time-stamps, integration and averaging . 6
6 Meteorology file format . 7
Bibliography . 19

Table 1 – General header fields . 7
Table 2 – IPR header fields. 9
Table 3 – Location fields . 9
Table 4 – Time fields . 10
Table 5 – Gap treatment . 11
Table 6 – Quality control . 12
Table 7 – Key words for the channel description . 13
Table 8 – Meteorological file format: variables . 15

INTERNATIONAL ELECTROTECHNICAL COMMISSION
____________
SOLAR THERMAL ELECTRIC PLANTS –

Part 1-3: General – Data format for meteorological data sets

FOREWORD
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The main task of IEC technical committees is to prepare International Standards. In
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• the required support cannot be obtained for the publication of an International Standard,
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• the subject is still under technical development or where, for any other reason, there is the
future but no immediate possibility of an agreement on an International Standard.
Technical specifications are subject to review within three years of publication to decide
whether they can be transformed into International Standards.
IEC TS 62862-1-3, which is a Technical Specification, has been prepared by IEC technical
committee 117: Solar thermal electric plants.

– 4 – IEC TS 62862-1-3:2017 © IEC 2017
The text of this Technical Specification is based on the following documents:
Draft TS Report on voting
117/68/DTS 117/78/RVDTS
Full information on the voting for the approval of this technical specification can be found in
the report on voting indicated in the above table.
This document has been drafted in accordance with the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2.
A list of all parts in the IEC 62862 series, published under the general title Solar thermal
electric plants, can be found on the IEC website.
The committee has decided that the contents of this publication will remain unchanged until
the stability date indicated on the IEC website under "http://webstore.iec.ch" in the data
related to the specific publication. At this date, the publication will be
• transformed into an International standard,
• reconfirmed,
• withdrawn,
• replaced by a revised edition, or
• amended.
A bilingual version of this publication may be issued at a later date.

SOLAR THERMAL ELECTRIC PLANTS –

Part 1-3: General – Data format for meteorological data sets

1 Scope
The goal of this document on data format is to reduce efforts for data exchange and to avoid
errors caused by misunderstandings due to the application of various different and at times
unclear formats. To achieve this goal, the proposed format has the following properties:
• suitability for common operation systems;
• suitability for satellite/model‐derived data;
• suitability for measured data;
• suitability for combined data sets;
• suitability for typical meteorological years and forecasted data.
2 Normative references
The following documents are referred to in the text in such a way that some or all of their
content constitutes requirements of this document. For dated references, only the edition
cited applies. For undated references, the latest edition of the referenced document (including
any amendments) applies.
ISO 8601, Data elements and interchange formats – Information interchange –
Representation of dates and times
ANSI INCITS 4-1986 (R2007), American National Standard for Information Systems – Coded
Character Sets – 7-Bit American National Standard Code for Information Interchange (7-Bit
ASCII)
3 Terms and definitions
No terms and definitions are listed in this document.
ISO and IEC maintain terminological databases for use in standardization at the following
addresses:
• IEC Electropedia: available at http://www.electropedia.org/
• ISO Online browsing platform: available at http://www.iso.org/obp
4 Format description
The data format has been inspired by the thesaurus on solar irradiance proposed at
EnvironInfo 2007.
After a header with information about the data, a data section follows with the meteorological
data. The data section starts after the "#begindata" header field (see Table 1), where the first
line contains the name or acronym of the parameters. The order of the columns is the same
as the order defined on the "channel" description (Table 7). After the data section, the last
line of the file contains "#enddata".

– 6 – IEC TS 62862-1-3:2017 © IEC 2017
The thesaurus is usually implemented in an XML-file format. Many applications in solar
energy tend to use a simpler ASCII data format with values separated by spaces or
semicolons ‘;’, each line standing for one point in time. The proposed data format tries to
combine both, as the data is stored in a simple ASCII format line by line. But it includes a
header which contains all information of the thesaurus. The data can be very easily converted
into an appropriate XML-file to be exchanged via standard web protocols.
Other sources which were used are the depri format which is used in some wind energy
environments (http://depri.org) and the climate and forecasting metadata conventions. For the
available options for delimiters, see Table 1, "#delimiter".
The fieldnames from Tables 1 to 8 are separated from the value of the parameter by a space.
5 General conventions
5.1 Character set
The format shall be based on the standard ASCII character set as defined in
ANSI INCITS 4-1986 (R2007). Using only the first 127 characters will ease exchange of data
between different operating systems. The field "#characterset" is mandatory as a second line
of the file to eas
...