Is there an analog to ArcGIS Area Solar Radiation in R?

Question

Is there a function in R to compute direct, diffuse, and global insolation based of DEM in R similar to Area Solar Radiation tool in ArcGIS?

Answer 1

The two R analogues to the Area Solar Radiation model in ArcGIS are the "solaR" Perpiñán (2012) and "insol" packages however, these are not implementations of the Fu & Rich (2002) algorithms. Since the Fu & Rich (2002) algorithm uses slope and aspect to build a sky mask to pass sun tracks though at each time step, it really is the de facto standard for spatial solar insolation estimates. I believe that the insol package will account for parallax but not actual topography.

Fu, P., & P.M. Rich (2002) A geometric solar radiation model with applications in agriculture and forestry. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 37:25-35

Perpiñán, O. (2012) solaR: Solar Radiation and Photovoltaic Systems with R, Journal of Statistical Software, 50(9):1-32.