Estimation of global solar radiation over the city of La Serena (Chile) using a neural network

An artificial neural network for the estimation of hourly global solar radiation in La Serena (Chile), was developed using data measured from a meteorological station. La Serena city (29°54′ S, 71°15′ W) is located in the bay area at south of the hyper-arid Atacama Desert. In this study, 25123 data points of global solar radiation of 5 years (2001–2005) were used to train the network and then 7618 data points of global solar radiation not used in the training process were predicted (years 2006 and 2007). The meteorological data used in the model were: wind speed, relative humidity, air temperature, and soil temperature. The results were compared with the real data and other models available in the literature, and shows that the neural network obtained can be properly trained and can estimate the hourly global radiation with acceptable accuracy.