Solar radiation estimations over India using Meteosat satellite images

India is endowed with good solar energy resource due to its geographic position in the equatorial Sun Belt of the earth, but its atmosphere can have eventual large presence of aerosols with the subsequent negative feedback to the solar radiation available. Therefore, solar resource assessment studies over India are of high interest for potential solar energy applications. In this work daily estimations of global horizontal and direct normal irradiation are presented for six locations in India covering the years from 2000 till 2007. These computations have been performed with IrSOLaV/CIEMAT method for computing solar radiation components from Meteosat images with a spatial resolution of less than 5 x 5 km. A brief assessment exercise of the model output have been made with ground measurements available from the World Radiation Data Centre database, which consists only of daily sums of global horizontal irradiation. The daily global horizontal irradiation estimated by the model has shown a general positive bias with the ground measurements in the range of 5%, being the root mean square deviation around 12%, excepting for Trivandrum location where there are evidences of higher uncertainty in the ground measurements. In addition, the dynamical behavior of daily global irradiation is quite well reproduced by the model as a consequence of adding to the input the daily turbidity values estimated from MODIS Terra satellite information. Estimations of direct normal irradiation are also exposed but no assessment was made due to the lack of ground measurements. The importance and need of accurate daily aerosol data with high spatial resolution for solar radiation estimations is pointed out in this work. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.