A fast all-sky radiative transfer model and its implications for solar energy research

Abstract:

Radiative transfer models simulating broadband solar radiation, e.g. Rapid Radiation Transfer Model (RRTM) and its GCM applications, have been widely used by atmospheric scientists to model solar resource for various energy applications such as operational forecasting. Due to the complexity of solving the radiative transfer equation, simulating solar radiation under cloudy conditions can be extremely time consuming though many approximations, e.g. two-stream approach and delta-M truncation scheme, have been utilized. To provide a new option to approximate solar radiation, we developed a Fast All-sky Radiation Model for Solar applications (FARMS) using simulated cloud transmittance and reflectance from 16-stream RRTM model runs. The solar irradiances at the land surface were simulated by combining parameterized cloud properties with a fast clear-sky radiative transfer model. Using solar radiation measurements from the US Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) central facility in Oklahoma as a benchmark against the model simulations, we were able to demonstrate that the accuracy of FARMS was comparable to the two-stream approach. However, FARMS is much more efficient since it does not explicitly solve the radiative transfer equation for each individual cloud condition. We further explored the use of FARMS to promote solar resource assessment and forecasting research through the increased ability to accommodate higher spatial and temporal resolution calculations for the next generation of satellite and numerical weather prediction (NWP) models.