Development of High-Resolution Hourly Cloud Datasets to Support the Development of Surface Solar Resource Datasets for the Canadian North.

The objective of this present contract is to produce high-resolution gridded hourly cloud data products to support the development of a high-resolution (4-5 km gridded) solar irradiance dataset for the Canadian North spanning 58° – 85°N latitude and 50 - 145°W longitude.

Sole Source Justification ‑ Exception of the Government Contract Regulations (GCR):

(d) Only one person or firm is capable of performing the contract

The Supplier must be able to meet all of the following criteria:

• Owns a unique data archive developed over time based on routinely collecting and processing satellite observations from the world’s geosynchronous (GEO) and low Earth orbiting (LEO) satellites for input into NASA satellite mission data production and analysis at the global scale.
• Developed a unique method to intercalibrate measurements from imagers on the GEO and LEO platforms and methods to fuse and stitch these measurements using advanced methods for data quality assurance and signal processing techniques for data fusion.
• Developed a unique and comprehensive system for retrieving cloud properties from the intercalibrated radiances from GEO and LEO satellite platforms.
• Owns a unique set of polar orbiting satellites and a satellite-derived weather surface models used to generate the raw datasets to be used for the development of high-resolution hourly time series of cloud datasets for the Canadian north resource datasets.

The identified provider is the only one able to meet all of the criteria identified above.