Abstract
Sunlight incident on the Earth’s atmosphere is essential for life, and it is the driving force of a host of photo-chemical and environmental processes, such as the radiative heating of the atmosphere. We report the description and application of a physical methodology relative to how an ensemble of very low-cost sensors (with a total cost of <$20, less than 0.5% of the cost of the reference sensor) can be used to provide wavelength resolved irradiance spectra with a resolution of 1 nm between 360–780 nm by calibrating against a reference sensor using machine learning. These low-cost sensor ensembles are calibrated using machine learning and can effectively reproduce the observations made by an NIST calibrated reference instrument (Konica Minolta CL-500A with a cost of around USD 6000). The correlation coefficient between the reference sensor and the calibrated low-cost sensor ensemble has been optimized to have 0.99. Both the circuits used and the code have been made publicly available. By accurately calibrating the low-cost sensors, we are able to distribute a large number of low-cost sensors in a neighborhood scale area. It provides unprecedented spatial and temporal insights into the micro-scale variability of the wavelength resolved irradiance, which is relevant for air quality, environmental and agronomy applications.
Highlights
The goal of this study is to provide an accurately calibrated low-cost wavelength resolved irradiance sensor, which is helpful for biometric pupillometry [14] applications, and is suitable to address the current lack of neighborhood scale real-time solar irradiance data by the provision of very low-cost calibrated measurements
We proposed a machine learning method, which works with some low-cost light sensors, in order to achieve competitive performance as well as high-resolution spectrophotometers
Machine learning was used to calibrate the inputs provided by the suite of low-cost sensors against the reference sensor
Summary
The goal of this study is to provide an accurately calibrated low-cost wavelength resolved irradiance sensor, which is helpful for biometric pupillometry [14] applications, and is suitable to address the current lack of neighborhood scale real-time solar irradiance data by the provision of very low-cost calibrated measurements. These sensors can be readily deployed at a scale across dense urban environments in order to measure the wavelength resolved irradiance. The plans and circuit diagrams for building these sensors, as well as the calibration code, are publicly available
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