Adelaide Advertiser
Thursday 29/11/2007 Page: 21
THE Gold Coast is sunny, so is the French Riviera, but NASA says the middle of the Pacific Ocean and the Sahara Desert are the sunniest spots - and the information could be worth money. America's space exploration agency has located the world's most sun-drenched spots by studying maps compiled by U.S. and European satellites.
The maps can also gauge solar energy at every other spot on the planet and have already been used to help businesses to site solar panels in Morocco, for instance, or send text messages to tell sunbathers in Italy to put on more cream. "We are trying to link up observations of the earth to benefit society," 72-nation Group on Earth Observations head Jose Achache said. The group, of which Australia is a member, seeks practical spinoffs from scientific data, ranging from deep-ocean probes to satellites.
GEO members will hold ministerial talks on Friday in Cape Town to review a 10-year project launched in 2005 which aims to join up the dots between research in areas such as climate change, health, agriculture and energy. From satellite data collected over 22 years, NASA says the sun blazes down most fiercely on a patch of the Pacific Ocean on the equator south of Hawaii and east of Kiribati.
More practically for solar generation, on land the Sahara Desert region soaks up most energy with the very sunniest spot in southeast Niger, where one sun-baked landmark amid sand dunes is a ruined fort at Agadem. "For some reason there are fewer clouds just there than elsewhere (in the Sahara)," NASA's Langley research centre senior scientist Paul Stackhouse said.
The area got a searing average of 6.78 kilowatt hours of solar energy per sq in per day from 1983-2005 - roughly the electricity used by a typical U.S. home in a day to heat water. The patch in the Pacific got 6.92 kilowatt hours. The maps could help guide billions of dollars in solar investments for a world worried by climate change, widely blamed on burning fossil fuels that could mean more floods, droughts, heatwaves and rising seas. Satellite pictures could also help place offshore wind farms - wind speeds can be inferred from wave heights and direction. Farmers might also be able to pick new crops, or estimate fertiliser demand, by knowing more about how much solar energy is reaching their land.
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