Advanced Hybrid Deep Learning Framework for Short-Term Solar Radiation Forecasting Using Temporal and Meteorological Features

Short-term forecasting of solar radiation is essential for the efficient operation of solar energy systems. This study presents a neural network-based approach for short-term solar radiation forecasting using a hybrid framework that integrates temporal characteristics with weather-based features. The proposed model combines a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) to capture short-term temporal dynamics, a Transformer Encoder, and a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) to integrate these representations for final prediction. Key meteorological variables, including temperature, humidity, and wind speed, are incorporated along with engineered time-related features such as lagged values, rolling statistics, and cyclical time-of-day encodings. The results demonstrate that the hybrid model effectively integrates sequential learning and feature interaction, leading to improved forecasting accuracy. The proposed approach achieves a test Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.056, Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.086, and coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.92, outperforming benchmark models such as AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), GRU, and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). The model maintains stable performance across cross-validation folds, multiple forecasting horizons, and varying weather conditions. These findings indicate that the proposed framework provides a reliable and practical solution for accurate short-term solar radiation forecasting, supporting real-time solar energy management and renewable energy system optimization.