Surface area of solar arrays in the conterminous United States

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Fort Collins Science Center created a national data set of the footprint area of solar arrays for the Bureau of Land Management’s National Operations Center. We identified potential solar facility locations for the conterminous U.S. using the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) utility-scale facilities data from 2015. The footprint area of each solar array was digitized on-screen using true color aerial imagery from the most recently available National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) for each state (NAIP 2013-2015). We used supplementary ESRI basemap imagery accessed via ArcGIS to verify locations of arrays observed in NAIP imagery. Arrays separated by more than 30 meters were delineated [...]