Abstract
Abstract. This study assesses the impact of dust on surface solar radiation focussing on an extreme dust event. For this purpose, we exploited the synergy of AERONET measurements and passive and active satellite remote sensing (MODIS and CALIPSO) observations, in conjunction with radiative transfer model (RTM) and chemical transport model (CTM) simulations and the 1-day forecasts from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). The area of interest is the eastern Mediterranean where anomalously high aerosol loads were recorded between 30 January and 3 February 2015. The intensity of the event was extremely high, with aerosol optical depth (AOD) reaching 3.5, and optical/microphysical properties suggesting aged dust. RTM and CTM simulations were able to quantify the extent of dust impact on surface irradiances and reveal substantial reduction in solar energy exploitation capacity of PV and CSP installations under this high aerosol load. We found that such an extreme dust event can result in Global Horizontal Irradiance (GHI) attenuation by as much as 40–50 % and a much stronger Direct Normal Irradiance (DNI) decrease (80–90 %), while spectrally this attenuation is distributed to 37 % in the UV region, 33 % in the visible and around 30 % in the infrared. CAMS forecasts provided a reliable available energy assessment (accuracy within 10 % of that obtained from MODIS). Spatially, the dust plume resulted in a zonally averaged reduction of GHI and DNI of the order of 150 W m−2 in southern Greece, and a mean increase of 20 W m−2 in the northern Greece as a result of lower AOD values combined with local atmospheric processes. This analysis of a real-world scenario contributes to the understanding and quantification of the impact range of high aerosol loads on solar energy and the potential for forecasting power generation failures at sunshine-privileged locations where solar power plants exist, are under construction or are being planned.
Highlights
Solar energy potential is sensitive to various atmospheric parameters
In order to provide a context for the high aerosol optical depth (AOD) values observed in the region during the extreme dust incursion on 1 February 2015, Fig. 4 presents scatter plots obtained from the multi-sensor aerosol products sampling system (MAPSS: https://giovanni.gsfc.nasa.gov/ mapss_explorer/) (Petrenko et al, 2012) of the MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)/Aqua satellite AOD at 550 nm compared to coincident groundbased AOD measured by CIMEL sun photometers in AERONET (Holben et al, 1998)
We firstly mapped and studied the 3-D structure of a severe dust event occurring on 1 February 2015 via synergy of MODIS/Aqua and CALIOP/CALIPSO space-borne observations
Summary
Solar energy potential is sensitive to various atmospheric parameters. In addition to the solar zenith angle (SZA) as the key determining factor, cloud presence is another factor that attenuates solar radiation arriving at the earth’s surface. In order to assess the impact of strong dust events on solar energy, a monthly climatology of aerosol optical depth (AOD) and spectrally integrated SSR, including the DNI and the GHI, was calculated with the radiative transfer model (RTM) libRadtran (Mayer and Kylling, 2005). LibRadtran contains a library of radiative transfer routines which, advantageously over other models (Emde and Mayer, 2007; Cahala et al, 2005; Marquart and Mayer, 2002), were originally designed to calculate spectral irradiance in the ultraviolet and visible spectral ranges It is user friendly, since it allows for the definition of the RTM inputs with human-readable files, and finds applications in the simulation of instruments, calculation of the radiation budget of the earth and, as in this study, in the development of remote sensing techniques.
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