The potential of different artificial neural network (ANN) techniques in daily global solar radiation modeling based on meteorological data

The main objective of present study is to predict daily global solar radiation (GSR) on a horizontal surface, based on meteorological variables, using different artificial neural network (ANN) techniques. Daily mean air temperature, relative humidity, sunshine hours, evaporation, and wind speed values between 2002 and 2006 for Dezful city in Iran (32 160N, 48 250E), are used in this study. In order to consider the effect of each meteorological variable on daily GSR prediction, six following combinations of input variables are considered: (I) Day of the year, daily mean air temperature and relative humidity as inputs and daily GSR as output. (II) Day of the year, daily mean air temperature and sunshine hours as inputs and daily GSR as output. (III) Day of the year, daily mean air temperature, relative humidity and sunshine hours as inputs and daily GSR as output. (IV) Day of the year, daily mean air temperature, relative humidity, sunshine hours and evaporation as inputs and daily GSR as output. (V) Day of the year, daily mean air temperature, relative humidity, sunshine hours and wind speed as inputs and daily GSR as output. (VI) Day of the year, daily mean air temperature, relative humidity, sunshine hours, evaporation and wind speed as inputs and daily GSR as output. Multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and radial basis function (RBF) neural networks are applied for daily GSR modeling based on six proposed combinations. The measured data between 2002 and 2005 are used to train the neural networks while the data for 214 days from 2006 are used as testing data. The comparison of obtained results from ANNs and different conventional GSR prediction (CGSRP) models shows very good improvements (i.e. the predicted values of best ANN model (MLP-V) has a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) about 5.21% versus 10.02% for best CGSRP model (CGSRP 5)). 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.