Retrieval and validation of global, direct, and diffuse irradiance derived from SEVIRI satellite observations

Abstract

[1] This paper discusses Surface Insolation under Clear and Cloudy skies derived from SEVIRI imagery (SICCS), a physics-based, empirically adjusted algorithm developed for estimation of surface solar irradiance from satellite data. Its most important input are a cloud mask product and cloud properties derived from Meteosat/Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) observations. These observations set the characteristics of the output, namely, a temporal resolution of 15 min, a nadir spatial resolution of 3 Â 3 km 2 , the period from January 2004 until at least November 2012, and the domain equal to most of the Meteosat disc. SICCS computes global, direct, and diffuse irradiance separately. Direct irradiance for cloudy skies is estimated with an empirical method. Hourly means retrieved with SICCS were validated with data from eight Baseline Surface Radiation Network stations for the year 2006. We found median values of the station biases of +6 W/m 2 (+5%) for direct irradiance, +1 W/m 2 (+1%) for diffuse irradiance, and +7 W/m 2 (+2%) for global irradiance. Replacing the three-hourly aerosol optical thickness input by monthly means introduces considerable additional biases in the clear-sky direct (À6%) and diffuse (+26%) irradiances. The performance of SICCS does not degrade when snow covers the surface. Biases do not vary with cloud optical thickness and cloud particle radius. However, the bias in global transmissivity tends to decrease with increasing cloud heterogeneity, and the bias in direct transmissivity is a function of the solar zenith angle. We discuss why satellite retrieval of surface solar irradiance is relatively successful.Citation: Greuell W., J. F. Meirink, and P. Wang (2013), Retrieval and validation of global, direct, and diffuse irradiance derived from SEVIRI satellite observations,

Multiresolution analysis of the spatiotemporal variability in global radiation observed by a dense network of 99 pyranometers

“…In future work, we plan to apply these findings towards an assessment of the level of accuracy of satellite-based estimates of shortwave irradiance from Meteosat SEVIRI with ground-based measurements (e.g., Deneke et al, 2008;Greuell et al, 2013), to separate retrieval uncertainties from the inherent uncertainty arising from the limited representativeness of one data set for the other. Based on the results presented here, it is important to explicitly take into account the sky condition including their occurrence frequencies in the validation, as the representativeness error is situation dependent and will therefore influence the validation statistics.…”

Evaluation of Himawari-8 surface downwelling solar radiation by ground-based measurements

“…To date, satellite-based estimates of surface global solar radiation are routinely performed by different algorithms which exploit the images recorded by geostationary satellites, such as the Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) and the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES), to relate satellite reflectance to cloud opacity. Among the available algorithms, it is worth mentioning the Heliosat-2 method (Raschke et al, 1987;Rigollier et al, 2004;Blanc et al, 2011), the State University of New York (SUNY) model (Perez et al, 2002), the Surface Insolation under Clear and Cloudy skies model (SICCS; Greuell et al, 2013), and more sophisticated radiative transfer models (e.g., Pinker and Laszlo, 1992) and algorithms based on neural network models (e.g., Takenaka et al, 2011;Taylor et al, 2016). Because of its unprecedented temporal resolution (up to 2.5 min), the new Japanese geostationary meteorological satellite Himawari-8 is expected shortly to attain a key position within this framework, drastically improving atmospheric research (Bessho et al, 2016) and forecasts of photovoltaic power generation (e.g., Ohtake et al, 2013Ohtake et al, , 2015.…”

“…This validation is performed by groundbased pyranometers usually on an hourly basis (e.g., Nottrott and Kleissi, 2010;Djebbar et al, 2012;Greuell et al, 2013;Federico et al, 2017). For example, Federico et al (2017) recently evaluated estimates of surface solar irradiance over Italy based on the observations of MSG's Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) and the SICCS model.…”

The Development and the Present Status of Energy Balance Climatology

“…This problem has not yet been solved. Besides most GCMs discussed above, many satellite-based works are still plagued with overestimation problems (Greuell et al 2013). Therefore, it is wrong to try to verify the GCM-simulated solar radiation against the satellite-derived irradiances.…”