Estimation of solar irradiance using ground-based whole sky imagers
This work addresses the need for more accurate solar irradiance predictions for renewable energy applications, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing WSI technology without introducing major innovations.
The paper tackled the problem of estimating solar radiation by using ground-based whole sky imagers (WSIs) to capture localized sky images with high resolution, and it validated the methods using measurements from co-located weather stations.
Ground-based whole sky imagers (WSIs) can provide localized images of the sky of high temporal and spatial resolution, which permits fine-grained cloud observation. In this paper, we show how images taken by WSIs can be used to estimate solar radiation. Sky cameras are useful here because they provide additional information about cloud movement and coverage, which are otherwise not available from weather station data. Our setup includes ground-based weather stations at the same location as the imagers. We use their measurements to validate our methods.