Solar radiation prediction using different techniques: model evaluation and comparison

Daily observations of meteorological parameters, air temperature, air pressure, relative humidity, water vapor pressure and sunshine duration hours observed at 12 stations in different climatic zones during 1961–2014 are reported for testing, validating and comparing different solar radiation models. Three types of Artificial Neural Network (ANN)methods, Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Generalized Regression Neural Network (GRNN) and Radial Basis Neural Network (RBNN) are applied in this study for predicting the daily global solar radiation (Hg) using above meteorological variables as model inputs. The Bristow-Campbell model has also been improved by considering the factors influencing the incoming solar radiation, such as relative humidity, cloud cover, etc. The results indicate that there are large differences in model accuracies for each model at different stations, the ANN models can estimate daily Hg with satisfactory accuracy at most stations in different climate zones, and MLP and RBNN models provide better accuracy than the GRNN and IBC models, for example, the MAE and RMSE values range 1.53–2.29 and 1.94-3.27MJm−2day−1, respectively for MLP model. The model performances also show some differences at different stations for each model, for example, the RMSE values from MLP model are 1.94 and 3.27MJm−2day−1at NN and HZ stations, respectively. Meanwhile, ANN models underestimate few high radiation values at some stations, which may due to the differences in training and testing data ranges and distributions of the stations. Finally, the differences in model performances from different solar radiation models have been further analyzed.