Abstract
Abstract. Ground-based whole-sky cameras are now extensively used for the localized monitoring of clouds. They capture hemispherical images of the sky at regular intervals using a fish-eye lens. In this paper, we propose a framework for estimating solar irradiance from pictures taken by those imagers. Unlike pyranometers, such sky images contain information about cloud coverage and can be used to derive cloud movement. An accurate estimation of solar irradiance using solely those images is thus a first step towards the short-term forecasting of solar energy generation based on cloud movement. We derive and validate our model using pyranometers colocated with our whole-sky imagers. We achieve a better performance in estimating solar irradiance and in particular its short-term variations compared to other related methods using ground-based observations.
Highlights
Clouds have a significant impact on solar energy generation
– We propose a method for estimating solar irradiance using ground-based sky camera images
We presented a method for estimating the rapid fluctuations of solar irradiance using the luminance of images taken by a whole-sky imager
Summary
Clouds have a significant impact on solar energy generation. They intermittently block the sun and significantly reduce the solar irradiance reaching solar panels. With rapid developments in photogrammetric techniques, ground-based sky cameras are widely used (Dev et al, 2016d). These cameras, known as whole-sky imagers (WSIs), are upwardlooking devices that capture images of the sky at regular intervals of time. These images are subsequently used for automatic cloud coverage computation, cloud tracking, and cloud-base height estimation. We use these imagers to study the effects of clouds on satellite communication links (Dev et al, 2017b, 2018b; Yuan et al, 2016)
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