This paper investigated the artificial neural network (ANN) modeling to forecast
the one-hour ahead global and diffuse solar radiation using the observed data
during 2019-2021 at a meteorological station in Bangkok, Thailand. Results from
the statistical analysis portrayed the abundance of the tropical solar radiation
and its large variation all year round. As a step to move advance the renewable
energy use of the solar radiation at the location, the ANN forecasting models were
proposed for all climatic conditions. The model input were the ambient
temperature, solar elevation, and an insolation parameter namely normalized
global solar radiation. The model performance was assessed by using the two
statistic parameters: normalized mean bias error (nMBE), and normalized root
mean square error (nRMSE). The results showed that the ANN models could
forecast the global radiation with the nMBE of 1.79% and nRMSE of 26.20%. For
the diffuse radiation forecast, the nMBE and nRMSE of the models were obtained
at 7.78% and 36.21%, respectively. In order to demonstrate a benefit of the two
developed ANN models, their forecasted horizontal data were employed to further
predict the total solar radiation on vertical plane. Benchmarked with the smart
persistence model, the developed ANN models possessed the higher forecasting
accuracy for all weather conditions.
Keywords
Artificial neural network, Diffuse radiation, Forecast, Global radiation, Tropical