Is there a transition of solar radiation from dimming to brightening over India?

Abstract

Recent observational studies show that solar radiation incident on ground has not been stable over the last several decades but underwent significant multi-decadal variations. From the 1950s, solar radiation has had a general decreasing trend, named dimming. Since the late 1980s, a trend reversal and partial recovery has been observed at many observations sites across the globe; it is the so-called brightening. The present study examined temporal and spatial trends in surface solar radiation (global and diffuse) and sunshine duration in India using a 40-year data set (1971–2010) of the twelve stations of solar radiation network of the India Meteorological Department. The research work examines the global solar radiation trends in all-sky and cloud-free sky conditions. The long-term variability in the diffuse components of solar radiation, bright sunshine duration, and cloud cover has also been studied over India.India is one of the few regions that showed a continuous and steady decline in global solar radiation from the 1970s to 2000. The declining trend of all-sky global irradiance over India as a whole was 0.6Wm−2 year−1 during 1971–2000 and 0.2Wm−2 year−1 during 2001–2010. A third-order polynomial fit to the data indicated a reversal in all-sky global irradiance around 2001 at some sites. Reversal or stabilization of global irradiance is also seen in seasonal mean values at some of the stations. The reversal in clear-sky global irradiance was clearly evident from 2001. Similar trend is also observed in bright sunshine duration. This confirms the well-known phenomenon of global dimming and global brightening over India. The analysis of global irradiance data highlights the fact that in general the dimming/brightening is station dependent because of regional sources and meteorology which contribute to the variation in solar irradiance.