Signature of the North Atlantic Oscillation on British solar radiation availability and PV potential: The winter zonal seesaw

• Published in: Solar Energy
• Main Authors: Colantuono, Guiseppe, Wang, Yimin, Hanna, Edward, Erdelyi, Robert
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 2014
• Subjects: F330 Environmental Physics; North Atlantic; North Atlantic oscillation
• Online Access: https://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/id/eprint/26006/; https://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/id/eprint/26006/1/1-s2.0-S0038092X14002850-main.pdf; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.solener.2014.05.045

The impact of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) on winter solar radiation in the British Isles is explored. Records of global horizontal radiation (GHR) from a set of UK Meteorological Office pyranometers spanning the last three decades have been compared to Hurrell's Winter NAO Index (WiNAOI). GHR in the West of Great Britain is found to be negatively correlated with WiNAOI; in eastern England, on the contrary, the correlation is significantly positive.These results disagree at least partially with the existing literature connecting NAO with irradiance in Europe, which reports a gradient of WiNAOI-versus-GHR's correlation oriented mainly meridionally, with the correlation coefficient becoming increasingly negative with increasing latitude.The picture for Great Britain emerging from the present high resolution study, instead, shows a correlation gradient dominated by a zonal component over Engl� the year-to-year winter solar radiation variance associated with variations in WiNAOI is estimated to be 35 using Empirical Orthogonal Functions analysis.Over the last 16. years, monthly GHR averaged over negative WiNAOI winters is 9.3 higher in a representative South-West location with respect to positive WiNAOI years, while in a sample South-East (SE) location is 10.3 lower. This clear result could impact large photovoltaic proposals, as it links a non-negligible fraction of winter's yield to a known climatic phenomenon. Although WiNAOI predictability is limited, the present analysis highlights that while winter solar radiation is mainly in phase with WiNAOI in the East, it is mainly in opposite phase in the West: to some extent, spatial variability can even out year-to-year variability in power yield. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.