Abstract
Abstract. Solar energy applications need global aerosol optical depth (AOD) information to derive historic surface solar irradiance databases from geostationary meteorological satellites reaching back to the 1980's. This paper validates the MATCH/DLR model originating in the climate community against AERONET ground measurements. Hourly or daily mean AOD model output is evaluated individually for all stations in Europe, Africa and the Middle East – an area highly interesting for solar energy applications being partly dominated by high aerosol loads. Overall, a bias of 0.02 and a root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 0.23 are found for daily mean AOD values, while the RMSE increases to 0.28 for hourly mean AOD values. Large differences between various regions and stations are found providing a feedback loop for the aerosol modelling community. The difference in using daily means versus hourly resolved modelling with respect to hourly resolved observations is evaluated. Nowadays state-of-the-art in solar resource assessment relies on monthly turbidity or AOD climatologies while at least hourly resolved irradiance time series are needed by the solar sector. Therefore, the contribution of higher temporally modelled AOD is evaluated.
Highlights
Introduction in Southern SpainDue to aerosol variability, a pure interpolation between grouOndcmeeaasnureSmcenites n(ifceexisting at all in the 1980’s and 90’s) is inadequate, and dedicated aerosol observations from satellites with a broader spatial coverage are Accurate knowledge about the variable aerosol concentration and composition in an hourly or daily temporal resolution is needed for the surface solar irradiance quantification used as basis for yield assessments of solar energy systems
This paper focuses on the accuracy assessment of daily and hourly resolved state-of-the-art global aerosol modelling with respect to solar energy needs
It uses the MATCH/DLR model version v4 dlr1.0 for this purpose and provides an overview on aerosol physics and chemistry, the emission databases and the transport scheme implemented in this model
Summary
The Model of Atmospheric Transport and Chemistry (MATCH, Collins et al, 2001; Fillmore, 2005; Rasch et al, 1997) is a three-dimensional global transport model describing an external aerosol mixture of several aerosol types. MATCH includes emission databases for seasonal sulphur emissions at 0 and 100 m height for 1990 and 2005, monthly mean surface di-methyl sulphate (DMS) emissions, monthly mean biomass burning black and organic carbon fluxes, monthly mean natural organic carbon fluxes from terpene emissions, fossil fuel black and organic carbon surface fluxes and an explicit dust mobilisation scheme (DEAD). The DEAD (Mineral Dust Entrainment and Deposition) model describes dust emission produced by the saltation process as a function of surface layer wind speed and a spatially varied erodibility, which is reduced in case of seasonal vegetation and modified according to the clay fraction in the underlying ground. The Angstroem coefficient based on 400 and 800 nm is given
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