THERMAL SCIENCE

International Scientific Journal

EVALUATION OF GLOBAL SOLAR RADIATION USING MULTIPLE WEATHER PARAMETERS AS PREDICTORS FOR SOUTH AFRICA PROVINCES

ABSTRACT
Models for estimating monthly average daily global solar radiation were developed for South African provinces. These models, in addition to the traditional sunshine hours used in existing models incorporates ambient temperature, relative humidity and wind speed as variable parameters for predicting global solar radiation, making it different from most of the existing models that use only sunshine hours as variable. Meteorological data obtained for nine locations in South Africa were employed in the model formulation. The accuracy of the models were verified by comparing estimated values with measured values in terms of the following statistical error tests: mean bias error (MBE), mean absolute bias error (MABE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), root mean square error (RMSE), and the regression coefficient (R2).The values of R2 for the formulated models are between the ranges of 90% - 99%. It was also observed that for an accurate estimation of global solar radiation in Eastern Cape Province, all weather elements are needed. This implies that the models give an excellent prediction for global solar radiation for their corresponding locations. Also, different errors calculated for the formulated models are close to zero especially MAPE. The result shows that the formulated models are good enough to be used to predict monthly average daily radiation for South Africa and also, the inclusion of some other elements in some of the models improved the accuracy of the predictions made by the models.
KEYWORDS
PAPER SUBMITTED: 2013-07-14
PAPER REVISED: 2014-04-24
PAPER ACCEPTED: 2014-06-07
PUBLISHED ONLINE: 2014-06-21
DOI REFERENCE: https://doi.org/10.2298/TSCI130714072A
CITATION EXPORT: view in browser or download as text file
THERMAL SCIENCE YEAR 2015, VOLUME 19, ISSUE Supplement 2, PAGES [S495 - S509]
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© 2024 Society of Thermal Engineers of Serbia. Published by the Vinča Institute of Nuclear Sciences, National Institute of the Republic of Serbia, Belgrade, Serbia. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International licence