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Historical Forecast

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Troubleshooting and FAQs

Data Troubleshooting and FAQs

What timezone are the timestamps?

User Guides

Subscription Management

We dive into the Timezone Picker. UTC or Longitude or Fixed offset from UTC

Timezone calculation is tricky, and we want to clarify in the Solcast toolkit the calculations when you select UTC or Longitude or Fixed offset from UTC.

When exporting Historical Time Series data from the Solcast toolkit you are presented with the following:

So what does this mean?

UTC

When selecting UTC, the period_end column in the export will be in UTC. For example, for the 1st of January 2007, at 1am it will be: 2007-01-01T01:00:00Z

Longitudinal

When selecting Longitudinal the system will adjust the time within the period_end column based off the longitudinal co-ordinate with the standard timezones of the world. An example of these timezones are presented below:

1.1: Diagram of Standard Timezones of the World

Therefore using the same example as above and exported for Sydney (standard offset of +10:00), the date time exported in this column would be 2007-01-01T11:00:00+10:00

Now you may have noticed above that there is a suffix of +10:00. This is only an indicator of how much offset has been applied to the date and time.

Fixed offset from UTC

Similar to selecting the longitudinal time, however this allows you the capability to select any offset you desire. However using the same example as above, if we selected +10 for the offset, the output date time format in the period_end column would be 2007-01-01T11:00:00+10:00

Summary

To sum up all the different formats in the above example, included below is a table sample, with the longitudinal co-ordinate of Sydney, along with an offset of +10 for the fixed offset.

This row of the export should all produce the same value, as it’s referencing the same time

Diagram 1.1:

UnaitxuGV, Heitordp and others, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22556731

• We dive into the Timezone Picker. UTC or Longitude or Fixed offset from UTC
• So what does this mean?
• UTC
• Longitudinal
• Fixed offset from UTC
• Summary