Comparison of hourly surface downwelling solar radiation estimated from MSG-SEVIRI and forecast by the RAMS model with pyranometers over Italy

The performances of the MSG-GHI estimate and RAMSGHI 1-day forecast are evaluated for 1 year (1 June 201331 May 2014) against data of 12 ground-based pyranometers over Italy spanning a range of climatic conditions, i.e. from maritime Mediterranean to Alpine climate. Statistics for hourly GHI and daily integrated GHI are presented for the four seasons and the whole year for all the measurement sites. Different sky conditions are considered in the analysis.

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of two global horizontal solar irradiance (GHI) estimates, one derived from Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) and another from the 1-day forecast of the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) mesoscale model. The horizontal resolution of the MSG-GHI is 3 x 5 km(2) over Italy, which is the focus area of this study. For this paper, RAMS has the horizontal resolution of 4 km.