We analyse the time series of solar irradiance measurements using chaos theory. The False Nearest Neighbour method (FNN), one of the most common methods of chaotic analysis is used for the analysis. One year data from the weather station located at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore with a temporal resolution of $1$ minute is employed for the study. The data is sampled at $60$ minutes interval and $30$ minutes interval for the analysis using the FNN method. Our experiments revealed that the optimum dimension required for solar irradiance is $4$ for both samplings. This indicates that a minimum of $4$ dimensions is required for embedding the data for the best representation of input. This study on obtaining the embedding dimension of solar irradiance measurement will greatly assist in fixing the number of previous data required for solar irradiance forecasting.
Data gaps are ubiquitous in spectral irradiance data, and yet, little effort has been put into finding robust methods for filling them. We introduce a data-adaptive and nonparametric method that allows us to fill data gaps in multi-wavelength or in multichannel records. This method, which is based on the iterative singular value decomposition, uses the coherency between simultaneous measurements at different wavelengths (or between different proxies) to fill the missing data in a self-consistent way. The interpolation is improved by handling different time scales separately. Two major assets of this method are its simplicity, with few tuneable parameters, and its robustness. Two examples of missing data are given: one from solar EUV observations, and one from solar proxy data. The method is also appropriate for building a composite out of partly overlapping records.
Ahead-of-time forecasting of incident solar-irradiance on a panel is indicative of expected energy yield and is essential for efficient grid distribution and planning. Traditionally, these forecasts are based on meteorological physics models whose parameters are tuned by coarse-grained radiometric tiles sensed from geo-satellites. This research presents a novel application of deep neural network approach to observe and estimate short-term weather effects from videos. Specifically, we use time-lapsed videos (sky-videos) obtained from upward facing wide-lensed cameras (sky-cameras) to directly estimate and forecast solar irradiance. We introduce and present results on two large publicly available datasets obtained from weather stations in two regions of North America using relatively inexpensive optical hardware. These datasets contain over a million images that span for 1 and 12 years respectively, the largest such collection to our knowledge. Compared to satellite based approaches, the proposed deep learning approach significantly reduces the normalized mean-absolute-percentage error for both nowcasting, i.e. prediction of the solar irradiance at the instance the frame is captured, as well as forecasting, ahead-of-time irradiance prediction for a duration for upto 4 hours.
One of the important open questions in solar irradiance studies is whether long-term variability (i.e. on timescales of years and beyond) can be reconstructed by means of models that describe short-term variability (i.e. days) using solar proxies as inputs. Preminger and Walton (2005, GRL, 32, 14109) showed that the relationship between spectral solar irradiance and proxies of magnetic-flux emergence, such as the daily sunspot area, can be described in the framework of linear system theory by means of the impulse response. We significantly refine that empirical model by removing spurious solar-rotational effects and by including an additional term that captures long-term variations. Our results show that long-term variability cannot be reconstructed from the short-term response of the spectral irradiance, which cautions the extension of solar proxy models to these timescales. In addition, we find that the solar response is nonlinear in such a way that cannot be corrected simply by applying a rescaling to sunspot area.
Solar irradiance is the primary input for all solar energy generation systems. The amount of available solar radiation over time under the local weather conditions helps to decide the optimal location, technology and size of a solar energy project. We study the behaviour of incident solar irradiance on the earths surface using weather sensors. In this paper, we propose a time-series based technique to forecast the solar irradiance values for shorter lead times of upto 15 minutes. Our experiments are conducted in the tropical region viz. Singapore, which receives a large amount of solar irradiance throughout the year. We benchmark our method with two common forecasting techniques, namely persistence model and average model, and we obtain good prediction performance. We report a root mean square of 147 W/m^2 for a lead time of 15 minutes.
Errors in applying regression models and wavelet filters used to analyze geophysical signals are discussed: (1) multidecadal natural oscillations (e.g. the quasi 60-year Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)) need to be taken into account for properly quantifying anomalous accelerations in tide gauge records such as in New York City; (2) uncertainties and multicollinearity among climate forcing functions prevent a proper evaluation of the solar contribution to the 20th century global surface temperature warming using overloaded linear regression models during the 1900-2000 period alone; (3) when periodic wavelet filters, which require that a record is pre-processed with a reflection methodology, are improperly applied to decompose non-stationary solar and climatic time series, Gibbs boundary artifacts emerge yielding misleading physical interpretations. By correcting these errors and using optimized regression models that reduce multicollinearity artifacts, I found the following results: (1) the sea level in New York City is not accelerating in an alarming way, and may increase by about 350 mm from 2000 to 2100 instead of the previously projected values varying from 1130 mm to 1550 mm estimated using the methods proposed by Sallenger et al. (2012) and Boon (2012), respectively; (2) the solar activity increase during the 20th century contributed about 50% of the 0.8 K global warming observed during the 20th century instead of only 7-10% (IPCC, 2007; Benestad and Schmidt, 2009; Lean and Rind, 2009). These findings stress the importance of natural oscillations and of the sun to properly interpret climatic changes.