Estimation of solar irradiance using ground-based whole sky imagers

Ground-based whole sky imagers (WSIs) can provide localized images of the sky of high temporal and spatial resolution, which permits fine-grained cloud observation. In this paper, we show how images taken by WSIs can be used to estimate solar radiation. Sky cameras are useful here because they provide additional information about cloud movement and coverage, which are otherwise not available from weather station data. Our setup includes ground-based weather stations at the same location as the imagers. We use their measurements to validate our methods.
Comment: Accepted in Proc. IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), July 2016