Using analogies from soil science for estimating solar radiation

Using analogies from soil science a new global radiation estimation method was developed and tested on a large North-American meteorological database. The newly developed procedure was compared to the well-known, Donatelli–Campbell method. Both the overall indicators and the more detailed analysis of the model performance confirmed that the new method is more efficient than the Donatelli–Campbell method. The improved performance is due to the greater number of parameters, as well as to the more adequate function type it uses during the calculation. Results suggest that it is sufficient to have 2 year-long data series for parameterizing the new method to provide at least as accurate radiation estimates as provided by the Donatelli–Campbell method. The new method can be efficiently used for locations with no radiation measurement by combining it with a simple spatial interpolation technique.