A High-Resolution Satellite-Based Solar Resource Assessment Method Enhanced with Site Adaptation in Arid and Cold Climate Conditions

Due to the favorable condition of arid and cold climates for ever-increasing photovoltaic installations by supporting them to operate around their maximum power, it would be interesting to evaluate the solar potential of this climate. In this study, we proposed a simple, semi-empirical model to estimate the global horizontal irradiance (GHI) from the high-resolution visible channel satellite data provided by the Japanese meteorological satellite Himawari 8/9. The site adaptation procedure uses approximately 2–3 years of data recorded at four ground stations in Mongolia’s arid and cold regions to optimize the model parameters in a lookup table. Then, the model’s performance is evaluated using the independent test data of 1–2 years. The previous version of the proposed model and shortwave radiation product retrieved from the JAXA’s P-Tree system are also used for benchmarking as baselines. As a result, we found that the performance of the proposed model under a time granularity of 10 min surpassed them with an RMSE of 85 W/m2 in an arid desert to 114 W/m2 in a cold climate. A significant improvement was especially noticed in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, where the resulting RMSE was 13 W/m2 and 131 W/m2 lower than the baseline models.