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solar-position-calculator

A program for calculating solar position from the website https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/grad/solcalc/. This program calculates the Azimuth and Elevation values based on time and location information.

Time zone format

The solar position calculation uses the Coordinated Universal Time or UTC time standard, and only requires the offset not the 'UTC'.

Time format

This program uses the ISO 8601 time format, where hour (hh) is represented between [00-23], minute (mm) with [0-60], and seconds (ss) with [0-60]. For instance, if you want to represent a time 3:25:42 PM with ISO 8601 format it shall be 15:25:42 with no AM/PM extenstion.

How to run the solar position calculator

To calculate the Azimuth and Elevation values, the program requires 7 arguments respectively:

  • Year
  • Month
  • Day
  • Longtitude
  • Latitude
  • Offset of time zone
  • Time (hh:mm:ss)

For example if you want to calculate the Azimuth and Elevation values in 2021 February 15, at 11:37:52 (hh:mm:ss) at America/Chicago (approximately Longititude: -98.583, Latitude: 39.833, UTC: -6:00). Your initial arguments should be:

./solar-position-calculator -y 2021 -m 2 -d 15 -o -98.583 -a 39.833 -u -6:00 -t 11:37:52

To see view the help menu, run:

./solar-position-calculator --help

Citing

If you have used our work please cite us

@InProceedings{Ufuktepe_2021_ICCV,
    author    = {Ufuktepe, Deniz Kavzak and Collins, Jaired and Ufuktepe, Ekincan and Fraser, Joshua and Krock, Timothy and Palaniappan, Kannappan},
    title     = {Learning-Based Shadow Detection in Aerial Imagery Using Automatic Training Supervision From 3D Point Clouds},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (ICCVW), Workshop on Analysis of Aerial Motion Imagery (WAAMI)},
    year      = {2021}
}