Estimation of solar radiation from Australian meteorological observations

Abstract

A carefully prepared set of Australian radiation and meteorological data was used to develop a system for estimating hourly or instantaneous broad band direct, diffuse and global radiation from meteorological observations. For clear sky conditions relationships developed elsewhere were adapted to Australian data. For cloudy conditions the clouds were divided into two groups, high clouds and opaque (middle and low) clouds, and corrections were made to compensate for the bias due to reporting practices for almost clear and almost overcast skies. Careful consideration was given to the decrease of visible sky toward the horizon caused by the vertical extent of opaque clouds. Equations relating cloud and other meteorological observations to the direct and diffuse radiation contained four unknown quatities, functions of cloud amount and of solar elevation, which were estimated from the data. These were the proportions of incident solar radiation passed on as direct and as diffuse radiation by high clouds, and as diffuse radiation by opaque clouds, and a factor to describe the elevation dependance of the fraction of sky not obscured by opaque clouds. When the resulting relationships were used to estimate global, direct and diffuse radiation on a horizontal surface, the results were good, especially for global radiation. Some discrepancies between estimates and measurements of diffuse and direct radiation were probably due to erroneously high measurements of diffuse radiation.