EVALUATION OF MODELS FOR ESTIMATING SOLAR IRRADIATION ON VERTICAL SURFACES AT VALENCIA, SPAIN

Hourly irradiation data recorded on vertical surfaces at north, east, south, and west orientations during the winter period going from December 1989 to March 1990 in Valencia, Spain, have been compared with estimated solar irradiation from several tilted-surface models. The isotropic-, Temps' and Coulson's-, Klucher's-, Hay's-, Skartveit's and Olseth's-, Gueymard's- and Perez' (simplified) models have been considered for this comparison. Root-mean-square-difference (RMSD), mean-bias-difference (MBD) and mean-absolute-difference (MAD) estimators have been used to measure the departure of models from experimental data. Modeled values are evaluated with the original coefficients proposed by the authors. Results of comparison show that the south orientation is less prone to modeling errors, Perez' 25-degrees circumsolar simplified model being the less affected by errors in north, east and south orientations; for west orientation Klucher's model gives a lesser error. These results are consistent with those reported in previous studies.