Coupling satellite images with surface measurements of bright sunshine hours to estimate daily solar irradiation on horizontal surface

Selmin Ener Rusen, Annette Hammer and Bulent G. Akinoglu

Renewable Energy, 2013, vol. 55, issue C, 212-219

Abstract: Satellite images are heavily used for the estimation of solar irradiation at the Earth's surface. The accuracy yet should be improved to attain more reliable input values for the use of all types of solar energy systems. This paper presents two new alternative approaches to increase the estimation accuracy of daily solar irradiation by coupling the satellite images with surface bright sunshine hour measurements. Two different approaches are described for the estimation of global solar irradiation on daily base, by using the data for some locations in Turkey and Germany. These approaches are compared with the estimation of a satellite model (HELIOSAT), Angstrom models and ground measured daily global solar irradiation by using regressions and error analyses. For nine out of ten stations the relative RMSE values of the proposed models slightly decrease in the range of only 2% in comparison with the direct satellite model for the daily global solar irradiation. The results obtained for the new approaches did not considerably improve the performance of the satellite model. However, it is possible to recommend new coupled approaches to estimate daily global solar irradiation because of their simpler calculation procedure. The results are encouraging for the future works to use long and short-term satellite image data together with the surface measured data to estimate the solar irradiation values.

Keywords: Solar energy; Bright sunshine hour; Satellite images; HELIOSAT; Angstrom model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148112007859
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:55:y:2013:i:c:p:212-219

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2012.12.019

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().