The smarts module contains functions for calling SMARTS: Simple Model of the
Atmospheric Radiative Transfer of Sunshine, from NREL, developed by
Dr. Christian Gueymard.
SMARTS software can be obtained from: https://www.nrel.gov/grid/solar-resource/smarts.html
Users will be responsible to obtain a copy of SMARTS from NREL, honor it’s license, and download the SMART files into their PVLib folder.
This wrapper is shared under a BSD-3-Clause License, and was originally coded in Matlab by Juan Russo (2001), updated and ported to python by Silvana Ayala (2019-2020). Original Matlab wrapper was made for graduate studies at the University of Arizona, python porting by NREL.
Copyright (c) 2021 National Renewable Energy Laboratory, University of Arizona Board of Regents
pySMARTS releases may be installed using the pip and conda tools. pySMARTSis compatible with Python 3.5 and above.
Install with:
pip install pySMARTS
For developer installation, download the repository, navigate to the folder location and install as:
pip install -e .
Please note that you will be responsible of downloading SMARTS 2.9.5 from NREL website, and setting SMARTSPATH environment variable to the location of the executable.
We suggest you install SMARTS on a folder that you have full access and permissions to modify files like your Document folder (i.e. Program Files might give you trouble).
============
Finally meeting the legendary author of SMARTS Christian Gueymard at IEA PVPS Task Group 13 meeting on Lisbon, on September 2023. Apparently new things are coming for SMARTS (and perhaps pySMARTS) in the near future.
