Global Solar Radiation Forecasting Based on Hybrid Model with Combinations of Meteorological Parameters: Morocco Case Study

Abstract

The adequate modeling and estimation of solar radiation plays a vital role in designing solar energy applications. In fact, unnecessary environmental changes result in several problems with the components of solar photovoltaic and affects the energy generation network. Various computational algorithms have been developed over the past decades to improve the efficiency of predicting solar radiation with various input characteristics. This research provides five approaches for forecasting daily global solar radiation (GSR) in two Moroccan cities, Tetouan and Tangier. In this regard, autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), autoregressive moving average (ARMA), feed forward back propagation neural networks (FFBP), hybrid ARIMA-FFBP, and hybrid ARMA-FFBP were selected to compare and forecast the daily global solar radiation with different combinations of meteorological parameters. In addition, the performance in three approaches has been calculated in terms of the statistical metric correlation coefficient (R2), root means square error (RMSE), stand deviation (σ), the slope of best fit (SBF), legate’s coefficient of efficiency (LCE), and Wilmott’s index of agreement (WIA). The best model is selected by using the computed statistical metric, which is present, and the optimal value. The R2 of the forecasted ARIMA, ARMA, FFBP, hybrid ARIMA-FFBP, and ARMA-FFBP models is varying between 0.9472% and 0.9931%. The range value of SPE is varying between 0.8435 and 0.9296. The range value of LCE is 0.8954 and 0.9696 and the range value of WIA is 0.9491 and 0.9945. The outcomes show that the hybrid ARIMA–FFBP and hybrid ARMA–FFBP techniques are more effective than other approaches due to the improved correlation coefficient (R2).