Measuring Albedo

Tom Stoffel is an atmospheric scientist with over 40 years of research experience in solar and atmospheric radiation measurements, including the design, development and operation of the Solar Radiation Research Laboratory at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado USA. 

During his 35-year career at NREL, he and his team of scientists and engineers focused on developing and applying best practices for measurement networks such as the Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN), the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program, and other projects supporting applications in photovoltaics, concentrating solar power, and climate science.

Richard Meyer is co-founder and CTO at Suntrace in Hamburg, Germany, where he is responsible for technical analysis, and in particular for all aspects involved with solar resource and energy yield modeling. Richard has worked extensively in solar energy research, engineering and project development for the past twenty years and is an expert in the field of solar resource assessment. Richard is co-founder of the IEA Task on solar resources, which is now under the lead of the International Energy Agency’s Technology Cooperation Programme PVPS. Since his time at Munich University in the 1990s he is familiar with measuring albedo for energy balance studies in hydrology. During more than 10 years or research at DLR (German Aerospace Center) he focused on satellite remote sensing of clouds and radiation.

Rabindra Kumar Satpathy is an electrical engineer with more than 30 years of experience working in the field of renewable energies, focusing on solar pv, power systems and wind power generation. Currently, Rabindra is the solar BU head of Jakson Solar dealing with the institutional sale of solar pv modules, solar retail and solar rooftop projects. Rabindra has been working extensively in field of solar energy in India and Asia - heading the solar commercial development group for Asia at Trina Solar in Singapore and being the president of RIL Solar Group, installing some of the largest scale solar roof top systems in India, such as at Thyagaraja Stadium and in Khimshar.  Rabindra is a member of the ISES Board of Directors Executive Committee

Kees Van Den Bos is the co-founder and co-owner of Hukseflux Thermal Sensors, producing sensors and measurement solutions for solar radiation, heat flux and thermal conductivity such as pyranometers and albedometers.

In the webinar Kees will introduce “good practices” to measure albedo, describing instrumentation and methods. His presentation will also focus on the on compliance with ISO instrument standards and with IEC standards for PV system performance monitoring.

Jan-Peter Muller is Professor of Image understanding and Remote Sensing and Head of the Imaging group at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London, UK. He has been an active member of the NASA MISR and MODIS science teams since 1989 and was responsible for the development of the MODIS BRDF/albedo product with Dr Alan Strahler at Boston University.

More recently, he was PI for the ESA GlobAlbedo project which fused MODIS BRDF climatology with European space data and co-ordinator for land products on the EU-FP7 QA4ECV project. Currently he is working on developing novel methods of upscaling and downscaling from tower-based albedo measurements to those from the Copernicus Global Land Service.