brubsby
Add way to filter search area based off nightlight intensity
In the DeepSolar supplemental information pdf, they detail a method they used to filter search area to urban areas which is pretty clever. They used Nasa nightlight imagery as a proxy for population and building density, and selected all areas in the US with an intensity over 128/255. They then go on to calculate that this covered 95% of all solar panels in the US via their random US satellite image sampling numbers.
I think the most difficult part of doing this would be mapping each pixel precisely to a lat/lon range, but other than that it seems tractable. This also seems like a very computationally cheap way to slowly expand the search radius when compared to polygon math.
I still think it's useful to be able to search in arbitrary polygons, so the project can be used for specific states/countries, but I think the nightlight method would scale better for very large areas.