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Raster Solar Radiation: How to use more than 32 calculation directions

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06-02-2024 08:12 AM
LarsUngerechts
New Contributor II

Hi,

in the past I have been using the Area Solar Radiation tool in order to calculate the hours of additional shadow created by wind turbines per year. In order to realize this I calculated two Sun Duration Rasters  (1. using a dsm without the wind turbines and 2. the dsm including the wind turbine heights) and subtracted them. To get good results I calculated samples for each 14 days and each 30 minutes a day. I also used 512 Calculation Directions. I have been quite pleased with the results. The only drawback has been the long calculation time for large areas. 

As we now have the Raster Solar Radiation tool, which should be more precise and utilizes CUDA technology, I wanted to use this command instead of the Area Solar Radiation. In general I can do the calculations and I get my results, but those are not usable in my case. It seems that the new Raster Solar Radiation tool just utilizes 32 calculation directions. I have not been able to change this. For this reason my results look like an explosion (but they should look like more like a butterfly). 

Here an example of the calculation result (Raster Solar Radiation) using one wind turbine a flat dsm:

LarsUngerechts_0-1717340519852.png

 

Here an example how it should look (Area Solar Radiation) using a real dsm:

LarsUngerechts_1-1717340721158.png

Is there a way to avoid my problem or simply define more calculation directions? I have tired all settings apart from using *.crf files, which have been problematic in my first runs.

Beste Regards

Lars

 

 

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1 Reply
RyanDeBruyn
Esri Contributor

Hello Lars thank you for your post.   

I am sorry to hear you are having issues with the new tools.  I will reach out to you directly to get more details.

Your use case is great example of how we can extend these tools.  The Raster Solar Radiation tool currently does not have the ability  to change the number of search directions and you are correct that 32 search directions are default. 

Supporting a user define number of search directions is on our road map for ArcGIS Pro and this is helpful for our prioritization.  For these types of analysis, using the Area Solar Radiation tool will provide you this flexibility in the meantime.  The solar insolation values calculated should not be significantly different between the two tools. 

Please note that the *.crf format is used to support the multidimensional raster output which provides time series (slices) results for each specified interval over the entire time configuration.   What issues you are seeing here?

Kind regards,

-Ryan

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