Abstract
Solar radiation is the main energy source for mankind and an accurate data of solar radiation levels for a particular location is vital for the optimum operation of solar energy transducers such as photovoltaic cells and solar thermal collectors. This study aimed to calibrate some of the existing models in the literature for estimating daily global solar radiation parameter using available measured records of air temperature extremes and new models were developed based on maximum and minimum air temperatures. Applicability of the Hargreaves model, Allen model, Bristow-Campbell model and Chen et al. model were evaluated for computing the global solar radiation for Hebron city in Palestine. Estimated values were compared with measured values in terms of the coefficient of determination (R 2 ) and root mean square error (RMSE). All models provide good estimates when compared to the accurate values with R 2 0.9226 (Bristow-Campbell model) to 0.9547 (Chen et al. model), while the proposed model provides a value of 0.9632. The RMSE value ranges from 0.7632 for Chen et al. model to 0.9211 for Bristow-Campbell model, however a lower value (0.7118) for the proposed model. This study found that the proposed model estimates global solar radiation at the location of study better than the other models.
Highlights
Solar radiation at the Earth’s surface is the principal and fundamental energy for many physical, chemical and biological processes, such as crop growth and plant photosynthesis, and it is an essential and important variable to many simulation models studies, such as agriculture, environment, hydrology, meteorology and ecology
In this work temperature extremes were used to evaluate the empirical formulas listed in table 1 in order to estimate global solar radiation in Hebron city, Palestine
Main aim of this study is the estimation of the daily total solar global radiation values by using maximum and minimum daily air temperatures
Summary
Solar radiation at the Earth’s surface is the principal and fundamental energy for many physical, chemical and biological processes, such as crop growth and plant photosynthesis, and it is an essential and important variable to many simulation models studies, such as agriculture, environment, hydrology, meteorology and ecology. The demand for suitable radiation data has in turn led researchers to develop a number of predictive methods for estimating solar radiation. Some of these methods include estimating solar radiation from other available meteorological observations [7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. Those are based on empirical relationships using commonly measured meteorological elements such as air temperature data are attractive due to lower data requirement and computation costs [3, 15]. The temperature-based solar radiation model can reduce the uncertainty of the crop simulations [1, 11, 16,17]
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