Abstract
This study examines the impact of various aerosol databases on the accuracy of irradiance predictions pertaining to the National Solar Radiation Database (NSRDB) over the Americas. Compared to the Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2) reanalysis and moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) space-borne observations, the various improvements that have been made to develop the SOLSUN aerosol database are described, using a monthly temporal resolution and a 4-km spatial resolution. Relative to MERRA-2, these improvements result in lower uncertainty in the solar irradiance components. The most recent version of the NSRDB now uses hourly MERRA-2 aerosol data with bias and elevation correction. This significantly improves the frequency distribution of hourly direct irradiance while having only a small impact on the annual solar resource, as suggested by the validation undertaken here at 12 control sites.
| Original language | American English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 8478427 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1732-1737 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| Journal | IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2018 IEEE.
NREL Publication Number
- NREL/JA-5D00-71597
Keywords
- Aerosol optical depth
- air mass
- elevation
- irradiance
- photovoltaic systems
- satellite
- solar energy
- solar resource
- spatial resolution
- validation