Solar Forecast Arbiter Blog

Updated Oct 18, 2021 The Solar Forecast Arbiter dashboard and API were not available from approximately 2021-10-12 02 UTC to 2021-10-16 18 UTC. From 2021-10-16 18 UTC through 2021-10-17 18 UTC several features remained unavailable, specifically validation of observation data and report computation. During this time uploads of observation data...

The Solar Forecast Arbiter platform recently experienced two outages over the last week. All systems were down and September 17, 2021 19:00 - September 19, 2021 00:00 September 27, 2021 01:00 - 12:40 UTC During these periods the Solar Forecast Arbiter dashboard and api were inaccessible. These outages were due...

Test Trial 3 will test day ahead and hour ahead forecasts for AC power, mean SURFRAD GHI, and probabilistic forecasts of GHI. This trial will run on Solar Forecast Arbiter version 1.0rc4. We ask that users not upload real forecasts for this test of the trial system. Rather, users should...

The Solar Forecast Arbiter is out of beta and onto the “release candidate” phase! This means that all of the important platform features are implemented and all known critical bugs are eliminated. A 1.0 final version will follow in the next few months. If you plan to use 1.0 final...

This post describes the first test trial of the Solar Forecast Arbiter framework, and a script that participants can uses to generate and post random forecasts for the trial. Read about the full testing plans in the Trials Testing blog post. To set up a trial, the framework administrators perform...

This post may be updated based on stakeholder feedback. The Solar Forecast Arbiter now supports anonymous operational forecast trials. The team has run a series of internal tests of this feature. Because of the importance of this feature, we’re requesting that forecast users and forecast vendors help us test the...

Are you curious about the Solar Forecast Arbiter but you don’t want to commit or you’re not sure how to get started? This is for you! First, we totally understand your hesitation. Full use of the Solar Forecast Arbiter requires a lot of trust in the technical aspects of the...

Several stakeholders have expressed interest in publicly sharing anonymous power plant data in the Solar Forecast Arbiter. While the Arbiter does not explicitly support anonymous data exchange, we can provide some recommendations for how to use the Arbiter’s features to accomplish this goal. Please keep in mind that these are...

Thanks to all of the stakeholders that provided feedback on the data exchange proposals. This blog post describes: Revised missing, irregular, and regular data policies New probabilistic forecast formats Miscellaneous changes to data exchange policies The revised versions of the dashboard documentation, API, and data model are now available: https://solarforecastarbiter.org/dashboarddoc/...

If you’re reading this, you should take 5 minutes to complete a handful of intro GitHub tasks. It’s free and it’s easy. First, sign up for GitHub at https://github.com/. If asked, choose the free plan. Why? Creating a GitHub account will give you much more visibility in project development (which...