Evaluation of classical parametric models for estimating solar radiation in the Eastern Mediterranean region of Turkey

Abstract

Accurate information on global solar radiation is essential to design and operate the systems that are based on solar energy. However, global solar radiation measurement is very rare while the measurements of other meteorological parameters such as air temperature, relative humidity, sunshine duration and precipitation are common in meteorological stations all around the world. Therefore, modelling global solar radiation is an important issue to fill the gaps in database and to estimate global solar radiation in places where global solar radiation measurement is not available. There are many different approaches in the literature for modelling global solar radiation.Two new methodologies are presented in this paper to develop parametric models for estimation of daily global solar radiation based on sunshine duration and relative humidity as well as a review of fourteen different already exist parametric models which are based on air temperature, maximum temperature, minimum temperature, precipitation, sunshine duration and relative humidity. The proposed models improve the estimation results of the other fourteen models with average mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.947MJ/m2 for Adana station, 1.086MJ/m2 for Göksun station, 1.074MJ/m2 for Tarsus station and 1.060MJ/m2 for whole study area. Hence, the proposed models which significantly approximate to measurements from pyranometers can be useful for the modelling global solar radiation in Eastern Mediterranean Region.