The solar Resource Assessment in Mexico: State of the Art

In the mid 70's of the last century, the first attempts were initiated in order to know precisely the Solar Climatology of Mexico. For this, data from heliographs and actinographs were used. Latter, in the 90's models based on the use of satellite images were employed. Currently a number of maps and databases describing spatially and temporally the solar resource distribution in the country can be found on the Internet, but in none of them confidence intervals of data are provided. This is due to a simple reason: historically there were only a handful of weather stations in the country that measured solar radiation over a long period of time. In the last two decades several automatic weather station networks have been established, which include radiometers. However, only very recently the radiometers from these stations have started to be systematically calibrated, and assessment of the quality of the previously measured data initiated. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.