MERRA-2 subset for evaluation of renewables with merra2ools R-package: 1980-2020 hourly, 0.5° lat x 0.625° lon global grid

Renewable variable energy resources (VER) - solar and wind energy are becoming increasingly important sources of electricity worldwide. Assessing the potential and the reliability of the resources requires long-term historical data. Directly measured solar radiation and wind speed are limited to locations of weather stations, and even when available, the observations are not directly suitable for the evaluation of VERs potential (as an example, the wind speed is rarely measured at wind turbines heights).  Reanalysis data based on satellite imagery and Earth system models, such as MERRA-2 offer a broad set of long-term time series on a global grid. `merra2ools` is a preprocessed subset of MERRA-2 variables and a software (R-package) designed for quick estimation of hourly output of solar photovoltaics and wind turbines. The grid of the MERRA-2 dataset has 0.625° step length along longitude (- 180° to 180°) and 0.5° along latitude (- 90° to 90°), making 576 x 361 grid or 207936 location...