Sunshine Mapping  

WorldChanging has an interesting little post up about a
European Space Agency project up to measure the amount of solar radiation hitting the ground around the globe, in order to identify optimal locations for solar power plants.

The European Space Agency's ENVISOLAR project is an ongoing effort to measure and map solar light intensity across the globe. Clouds, ozone, atmospheric aerosols and the like can reduce the amount of sunshine hitting the ground; this information is useful for businesses needing sunlight -- tourism, farming, and particularly solar power generation.

ENVISOLAR takes data from a variety of satellite sources, such as the Heliosat-3 project, as well as the handful of ground-level solar intensity measurement stations. The measurements are akin to those done for the UN Environment Program's SWERA project, which looked at solar and wind potential in the developing world. The resulting solar radiation maps can be used by utilities to calculate best locations for and expected output from solar power facilities.