Quantitative evaluation of the impact of cloud transmittance and cloud velocity on the accuracy of short-term DNI forecasts

Mengying Li, Yinghao Chu, Hugo T.C. Pedro and Carlos F.M. Coimbra

Renewable Energy, 2016, vol. 86, issue C, 1362-1371

Abstract: Ground based sky imaging and irradiance sensors are used to quantitatively evaluate the impact of cloud transmittance and cloud velocity on the accuracy of short-term direct normal irradiance (DNI) forecasts. Eight representative partly-cloudy days are used as an evaluation dataset. Results show that incorporating real-time sky and cloud transmittances as inputs reduces the root mean square error (RMSE) of forecasts of both the Deterministic model (Det) (16.3%∼ 17.8% reduction) and the multi-layer perceptron network model (MLP) (0.8% ∼ 6.2% reduction). Four computer vision methods: the particle image velocimetry method, the optical flow method, the x-correlation method and the scale-invariant feature transform method have accuracies of 83.9%, 83.5%, 79.2% and 60.9% in deriving cloud velocity, with respect to manual detection. Analysis also shows that the cloud velocity has significant impact on the accuracy of DNI forecasts: underestimating the cloud velocity magnitude by 50% results in 30.2% (Det) and 24.2% (MLP) increase of forecast RMSE; a 50% overestimate results in 7.0% (Det) and 8.4% (MLP) increase of RMSE; a ±30∘ deviation of cloud velocity direction increases the forecast RMSE by 6.2% (Det) and 6.6% (MLP).

Keywords: Local sensing; Sky and cloud transmittances; Cloud velocity derivations; Solar forecasts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:86:y:2016:i:c:p:1362-1371

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2015.09.058

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