Seasonal Variations of Direct Solar Irradiance with Ground and Air Atmospheric Data Fusion for Peninsular Type Coastal Area

Localized solar irradiance is normally derived from atmospheric transmission influenced by atmospheric composition and conditions of the target area. Specially, for the area with complex coastal lines such as Taean gun, the accurate estimation of solar irradiance requires for in depth analysis of atmospheric transmission characteristics based on the localized vertical profiles of the key atmospheric parameters. Using MODTRAN (MODerate resolution atmospheric TRANsmission) 6, we report a computational study on clear day atmospheric transmission and direct solar irradiance estimation of Taean gun using the data collected from 3 ground stations and radiosonde measurement over 93 clear days in 2018. The MODTRAN estimated direct solar irradiance is compared with the measurement. The results show that the normalized residual mean (NRM) is 0.28 for the temperature based MODTRAN atmospheric model and 0.32 for the pressure based MODTRAN atmospheric model. These values are larger than 0.1~0.2 of the other study and we understand that such difference represents the local atmospheric characteristics of Taean gun. The results also show that NRM tends to increase noticeably in summer as the temperature increases. Such findings from this study can be very useful for estimation and prediction of the atmospheric condition of the local area with complex coastal lines.