Empirical relations for the determination of solar radiation in Ibadan, Nigeria

Variations in the average monthly, seasonal and daily patterns of total radiation, relative humidity, temperature and sunshine duration in Ibadan have been presented. Various empirical models relating solar radiation to the basic climatological parameters such as relative humidity, sunshine hours, temperature as well as geographical declination, latitude and altitude factors were investigated from the viewpoint of obtaining appropriate empirical formulae to determine solar radiation from such common parameters. The average monthly total radiation is shown to be predicted with reasonable accuracy by a couple of empirical formulae with the best result obtained from a newly proposed formula. The new formula is shown to give also good agreement when applied to the analysis of annual daily insolation data on a seasonal basis. Finally, the proposed formula predicts a linear relationship between the daily diffuse radiation and the daily total radiation in line with the Liu and Jordan model but with the fiffuse component generally higher in qualitative agreement with observations in the tropics.