One of the main objectives of the European Community Programme on Solar Energy is to provide solar energy practitioners -- architects and engineers who design and implement both active and passive solar energy systems, including biomass and daylighting systems -- with well documented meteorological and climatological data so that they can estimate the solar radiation falling on a receiving surface for any location and at any time throughout the year. As a complement to its other landmark contributions in providing firm data to the solar energy community, the CEC launched a new, 36-month-long...