Assessing aerosol effects on solar irradiance in the NEOM region with the WRF-solar model

This study demonstrates the usability of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF)-Solar model, in predicting solar irradiance in the NEOM region of Saudi Arabia across different sky conditions. This research aims to enhance the accuracy of solar radiation forecasting by systematically evaluating the model's responses to external time-varying two-dimensional (2-D) aerosol optical depth (AOD) data at 550 nm under scenarios with varying cloud cover and aerosol levels. Through experiments representing distinct sky conditions, this study demonstrates consistent trends, with the control experiment (CTRL) consistently producing the highest Global Horizontal Irradiance (GHI) and Direct Normal Irradiance (DNI) due to lower representation of AOD in the model. Notably, experiments incorporating time-varying 2-D AOD from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) reanalysis outperform other experiments with NASA’s Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, version 2 (MERRA- 2) analysis, and climatological AOD datasets, particularly on overcast days. Model validation against observations from the Tabuk University station further substantiates these findings. Furthermore, experimental results highlight the importance of dynamic aerosol data over the climatological or no-aerosol data in improving the solar energy predictions, emphasizing the need for accurate representation of aerosol-cloud-radiation interactions in numerical models for precise solar irradiance forecasting.