Solar Radiation variability.

Solar Radiation variability.

by Theodoros Gkousarov -
Number of replies: 2

Hi All,

I think it would be nice to have the ability to plot a few months showing the variability of solar radiation ( as far as the CM SAF products) across Europe.

The interesting point is to see which areas across Europe show the lowest and which the highest variability and therefore are more reliable or not for the renewable energy industry and not only.

So is here anybody having an idea of how to start? the period should be long ebough to make some usefull clues so lets say 25 years.

I open this thread now but possibly will start playing with that late in this month.

 

Cheers.

In reply to Theodoros Gkousarov

Re: Solar Radiation variability.

by Jörg Trentmann -

Hi Theo,

nice project, I guess for the solar energy industry the variability on the daily time scale is mainly interesting.

To evaluate the temporal variability you can use the CM SAF data set of the daily mean surface radiation from 1983 to 2005 in combination with the cdo-commands 'timselvar' and/or 'timselstd', i.e., to calculate the variance and/or the standard deviation of the time series. To limit the variability due to the annual cycle I would suggest to start by looking at daily mean data from a given month, e.g., Juli (cdo selmon,7 ...). This should result in a map of the temporal variability of the daily surface irradiance.

I believe the solar energy industry also calculates exceedance levels, i.e., levels of solar radiation that are exceeded on a certain percentage of days (e.g., 90 %) for each month/year, see for example the presentation by Michal Journee from the 2011 EUMETSAT conference:
Towards a climatology of surface incoming solar radiation over the Benelux by merging long time-series of Meteosat-derived estimations and ground-based measurements

There is a R package available for some applications of photovoltaic systems (http://solar.r-forge.r-project.org/) that might be useful for some of your investigations as well.

Kind regards,
Jörg

In reply to Jörg Trentmann

Re: Solar Radiation variability.

by Theodoros Gkousarov -

Here we are back :)

So right now I am downloading the 1983-2005 SIS dataset of daily mean for the subdomain of UK.

I will use CDO and R to proccess the data. The final results that I want  to have is 12 charts ( from 12 months) showing the temporal variability of the SIS each month and to present the results using visual maps and not charts or wiskey plots. So I would like to see which areas in UK are more reliable ( less variability) and which not reliable ( high variability) as far as the Solar incoming shortwave Radiation.

Unfortunately Jorg the Solar-r package seemed to me a bit complicated and for the time being I think I can obtain the results using the cdo commands that you just described.

The results of this project will be published in the forum resuts.

Thank you.