Estimating solar irradiation in the Arctic

Source at https://doi.org/10.1051/rees/2016048. Solar radiation data plays an important role in pre-feasibility studies of solar electricity and/or thermal system installations. Measured solar radiation data is scarcely available due to the high cost of installing and maintaining high quality solar...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Renewable Energy and Environmental Sustainability
Main Authors: Babar, Bilal, Boström, Tobias
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: EDP Open 2016
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10037/15217
https://doi.org/10.1051/rees/2016048
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Summary:Source at https://doi.org/10.1051/rees/2016048. Solar radiation data plays an important role in pre-feasibility studies of solar electricity and/or thermal system installations. Measured solar radiation data is scarcely available due to the high cost of installing and maintaining high quality solar radiation sensors (pyranometers). Indirect measured radiation data received from geostationary satellites is unreliable at latitudes above 60 degrees due to the resulting flat viewing angle. In this paper, an empirical method to estimate solar radiation based on minimum climatological data is proposed. Eight sites in Norway are investigated, all of which lie above 60 N. The estimations by the model are compared to the ground measured values and a correlation coefficient of 0.88 was found while over all percentage error was −1.1%. The proposed models is 0.2% efficient on diurnal and 10.8% better in annual estimations than previous models.