The analysis of clouds in the earth's atmosphere is important for a variety of applications, viz. weather reporting, climate forecasting, and solar energy generation. In this paper, we focus our attention on the impact of cloud on the total solar irradiance reaching the earth's surface. We use weather station to record the total solar irradiance. Moreover, we employ collocated ground-based sky camera to automatically compute the instantaneous cloud coverage. We analyze the relationship between measured solar irradiance and computed cloud coverage value, and conclude that higher cloud coverage greatly impacts the total solar irradiance. Such studies will immensely help in solar energy generation and forecasting.
@article{arxiv.1703.05591,
title = {Cloud Radiative Effect Study Using Sky Camera},
author = {Soumyabrata Dev and Shilpa Manandhar and Feng Yuan and Yee Hui Lee and Stefan Winkler},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.05591},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
Accepted in Proc. IEEE AP-S Symposium on Antennas and Propagation and USNC-URSI Radio Science Meeting, 2017