Analysis of the Quality of Long-term Synthetic Solar Radiation Data Generated from Stochastic Models

In this paper, some of the existing solar radiation prediction models are reviewed initially and two suitable stochastic long-term solar radiation prediction models were identified. These models were implemented to generate synthetic solar radiation data. The simulated radiation data were compared with measured data in terms of time correlation and statistical characteristics. Most importantly, the paper proposed a new property, namely the probability distributions of the first order differences in solar hourly radiation and show that these distributions computed for a particular hour of the day remain identical from year to year. The paper further shows that the studied solar radiation models fail to preserve this property and some of the implications associated with these limitations are briefly discussed.