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Babak Mohammadi

Doctoral student

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Application of ERA-Interim, empirical models, and an artificial intelligence-based model for estimating daily solar radiation

Author

  • Babak Mohammadi
  • Roozbeh Moazenzadeh
  • Quoc Bao Pham
  • Nadhir Al-Ansari
  • Khalil Ur Rahman
  • Duong Tran Anh
  • Zheng Duan

Summary, in English

Solar radiation plays a pivotal role in the energy balance at the Earth's surface, evaporation, snow melting, water requirements of plants, and hydrological control of catchments. In this work, performance of ERA-Interim (a reanalysis dataset) was examined to estimate solar radiation at Ahvaz, BandarAbbas, and Kermanshah weather stations representing the even spatial distribution over Iran using eight empirical models and an artificial intelligence-based model (SVM: Support Vector Machine). In the calibration set, SVM exhibited the best performance with RMSEs of 249, 299 and 437 J.cm−2.day−1 at the aforementioned stations, respectively. In validation set, SVM reduced the errors in the estimates of solar radiation by 2.5 and 7.3 percent compared to the best empirical model at Ahvaz station (Abdallah model, RMSE = 242 J.cm−2.day−1) and Kermanshah station (Angstrom-Prescott model, RMSE = 315 J.cm−2.day−1), respectively. During the validation at BandarAbbas station, Bahel and Abdallah model (RMSE = 309 J.cm−2.day−1), Angstrom-Prescott model (RMSE = 310 J.cm−2.day−1) and SVM (RMSE = 312 J.cm−2.day−1) showed a relatively similar performance. The results also showed that the ERA-Interim dataset can be a comparatively suitable alternative to some of the empirical models, where radiation or the input parameters of empirical models are not directly measured, with RMSEs ​​of 382.81, 320.82 and 414.1 J.cm−2.day−1 at Ahvaz, BandarAbbas, and Kermanshah stations, respectively (in validation phase); although its error rates are significant compared with the SVM model, and substituting it for artificial intelligence-based models is not recommended.

Department/s

  • Dept of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science
  • MERGE: ModElling the Regional and Global Earth system

Publishing year

2022-01

Language

English

Publication/Series

Ain Shams Engineering Journal

Volume

13

Issue

1

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Ain Shams University

Topic

  • Other Environmental Engineering
  • Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences

Keywords

  • Iran
  • Meteorological variables
  • Renewable energy
  • Solar radiation

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 2090-4479