Identification

Title

Impacts of the aerosol representation in WRF-solar clear-sky irradiance forecasts over CONUS

Abstract

Aerosol optical depth (AOD) is a primary source of solar irradiance forecast error in clear-sky conditions. Improving the accuracy of AOD in NWP models like WRF will thus reduce error in both direct normal irradiance (DNI) and global horizontal irradiance (GHI), which should improve solar power forecast errors, at least in cloud-free conditions. In this study clear-sky GHI and DNI was analyzed from four configurations of the WRF-Solar model with different aerosol representations: 1) the default Tegen climatology, 2) imposing AOD forecasts from the GEOS-5 model, 3) imposing AOD forecasts from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) model, and 4) the Thompson-Eidhammer aerosol-aware water/ice-friendly aerosol climatology. More than 8 months of these 15-min output forecasts are compared with high-quality irradiance observations at NOAA SURFRAD and Solar Radiation (SOLRAD) stations located across CONUS. In general, WRF-Solar with GEOS-5 AOD had the lowest errors in clear-sky DNI, while WRF-Solar with CAMS AOD had the highest errors, higher even than the two aerosol climatologies, which is consistent with validation of the four AOD550 datasets against AERONET stations. For clear-sky GHI, the statistics differed little between the four models, as expected because of the lesser sensitivity of GHI to aerosol loading. Hourly average clear-sky DNI and GHI were also analyzed, and they were additionally compared with CAMS model output directly. CAMS irradiance performed competitively with the best WRF-Solar configuration (with GEOS-5 AOD). The markedly different performance of CAMS versus WRF-Solar with CAMS AOD indicates that CAMS is apparently less sensitive to AOD550 than WRF-Solar is.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7ff3x8j

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2023-02-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact