Elsevier

Solar Energy

Volume 77, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 159-169
Solar Energy

The method Heliosat-2 for deriving shortwave solar radiation from satellite images

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.solener.2004.04.017Get rights and content

Abstract

This article presents the method Heliosat-2 that converts observations made by geostationary meteorological satellites into estimates of the global irradiation at ground level. This new version integrates the knowledge gained by various exploitations of the original method Heliosat and its varieties in a coherent and thorough way. It is based upon the same physical principles but the inputs to the method are calibrated radiances, instead of the digital counts output from the sensor. This change opens the possibilities of using known models of the physical processes in atmospheric optics, thus removing the need for empirically defined parameters and of pyranometric measurements to tune them. The ESRA models are used for modeling the clear-sky irradiation. The assessment of the ground albedo and the cloud albedo is based upon explicit formulations of the path radiance and the transmittance of the atmosphere. The method Heliosat-2 is applied to Meteosat images of Europe for the months of January 1995, April 1995 and July 1994. Pyranometric measurements performed by thirty-five meteorological stations are used to assess the performances that are close to those of Heliosat-1 found in the literature. Possible improvements are discussed.

Introduction

Several authors have shown the potentialities of the images of the Earth taken by the meteorological satellites for the mapping of the global irradiation impinging on a horizontal surface at the ground level. Zelenka et al., 1992, Zelenka et al., 1999 and Perez et al. (1997) demonstrate that for the best methods and for pixels of size of 10 km or so, the irradiation assessed by satellite is better than that estimated by the means of an interpolation technique applied to measurements performed at meteorological stations as soon as the distance to the stations is greater than 34 km for the hourly irradiation and 50 km for the daily irradiation.

Many methods were developed especially in the '80s. Among them was the method called Heliosat-1 (Cano, 1982; Cano et al., 1986; Michaud-Regas, 1986; Diabaté, 1989), one the most accurate as shown by several authors (Grüter et al., 1986; Raschke et al., 1991). It was simple enough to widely disseminate in the world (Diabaté et al., 1988a, Diabaté et al., 1988b, Diabaté, 1989; Wald et al., 1992). It became popular and several modifications were proposed (Moussu et al., 1989; Obrecht, 1990; Zelenka et al., 1992, Zelenka et al., 1999; Beyer et al., 1996; Fontoynont et al., 1997; Iehlé et al., 1997; Ineichen and Perez, 1999).

There are several empirical parameters in the method Heliosat-1, especially in the computation of the apparent albedoes of the ground and clouds and normalization of the digital counts. The relationship between the cloud index and the clearness index is empirically defined and its parameters are computed by the means of a comparison between the cloud index and measurements made by meteorological stations in the area under concern. All these parameters were well tuned during the construction of the method or of its varieties using ground-based measurements and this explains the good results attained by the authors. Table 1 gives the root mean square error (RMSE) reported by authors having developed a variety of the Heliosat-1 method and using measurements for tuning parameters (Rigollier, 2000). In all cases, adjustment is made with a null bias. The errors are obtained by subtracting satellite-derived assessments from ground measurements performed in the meteorological network at a coincident location and coincident time.

However, when applied to other areas, or other periods, the accuracy, expressed as bias and RMSE in percentage of the mean irradiation, is usually lower than claimed by the inventors (Table 2). For example, one may note that the biases are not negligible in many cases. One may also remark in the first two rows that the biases found by Diabaté for two different periods over the same area differ largely: −7% in 1983 and −1% for 1984 and 1985. Using the same parameters than Diabaté, Obrecht and Raschke found biases in monthly means of daily irradiation that range from −8% to −29% for various parts of Sahel. This table clearly shows that modifications of the method Heliosat-1 are necessary to ensure that any correct implementation should lead to similar performances.

The purpose of the present paper is to present a new version, called Heliosat-2, which integrates the knowledge gained by these various exploitations of the original method and its varieties in a coherent and thorough way. The various empirical parameters present in the method Heliosat-1 are now expressed using physical laws and there is no need for coincident pyranometric measurements to tune these parameters. The major motivations for creating this new version were to improve the capabilities of the method to process any type of data taken in the broadband visible range by geostationary meteorological satellites, including large time-series of images taken by different sensors, and to improve the implementation of the method by reducing the number of empirical parameters.

Section snippets

The new method Heliosat-2

Given the good fundamentals of the method Heliosat-1, it was decided to keep it principle, that is the construction of a “cloud index” resulting from a comparison of what is observed by the sensor to what should be observed over that pixel if the sky were clear, which is related to the “clearness” of the atmosphere. Actually, this principle is commonly adopted when the only inputs are images taken in the visible broad range (Pastre, 1981; Möser and Raschke, 1983, Möser and Raschke, 1984; Cano

Comparison between retrieved values and station measurements

Similarly to previous works, hourly and daily irradiations derived from satellite are compared to measurements performed at ground level by pyranometers in meteorological stations (Table 3). The 35 stations were selected in flat areas, in order to avoid the specific errors encountered in mountainous areas. We only used measurements of hourly irradiation greater than 10 W h m−2, a value typical of the diffuse hourly irradiation for the sunset and sunrise under clear-sky at 60°N. For these hours of

Conclusion

The method Heliosat-2 meets the objectives set up before its development. It is more physically sound than the previous one. All parameters that needed to be tuned for each implementation of the method Heliosat-1 have been removed, set up to constant values, or automatically determined. No ground measurement is used for the development, contrary to the method Heliosat-1 and others. This should ensure a worldwide application of the method Heliosat-2.

The first comparison with ground measurements

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Hans-Georg Beyer, Dominique Dumortier, Gerhard Gesell, Annette Hammer, Detlev Heinemann, Pierre Ineichen, John Page, Christian Perrin de Brichambaut, Richard Perez, Corrado Ratto, Christian Reise, Antoine Zelenka for the numerous discussions we had on the method Heliosat and its various improvements. We thank the two referees for their help in clarifying the content of the paper. The meteorological offices from France, Germany, Hungary, Spain, The Netherlands and United

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    Christelle Rigollier is now with Silogic, Toulouse, France.

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