SolarCube: An Integrative Benchmark Dataset Harnessing Satellite and In-situ Observations for Large-scale Solar Energy Forecasting

Solar power is a critical source of renewable energy, offering significant potential to lower greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change. However, the cloud induced-variability of solar radiation reaching the earth's surface presents a challenge for integrating solar power into the grid (e.g., storage and backup management). The new generation of geostationary satellites such as GOES-16 has become an important data source for large-scale and high temporal frequency solar radiation forecasting. However, no machine-learning-ready dataset has integrated geostationary satellite data with fine-grained solar radiation information to support forecasting model development and benchmarking with consistent metrics. SolarCube covers 19 study areas distributed over multiple continents: North America, South America, Asia, and Oceania.