Use of the Artificial Neural Network and

Meteorological Data for Predicting Daily Global Solar

Radiation in Djelfa, Algeria
b
d
d
O. Assasa,", H. Bouzgou ,So Fetaha, , M. Salmia, , A. Boursasa

a Laboratoire de physique et chimie des materiaux (LPCM). Universite de M'sila.

b Departement d'electronique. Universite de M'sila.
c Departement d'electronique. Universite de Batna.
d Departement de physique. Universite Ferhat Abbas, Setif.
e-mail : assas_warda@yahoo.fr

Abstract- This paper presents a set of artificial neural

network models (ANN) to estimate daily global solar

radiation

(GSR)

on

meteorological variables:
solar

radiation

horizontal

surface

using

(mean daily extraterrestrial

intensity Go,

the

maximum

possible

sunshine hours So, mean daily relative humidity H, mean

daily

maximum

air

temperature

T,

mean

daily

atmospheric pressure P and wind speed Vx) for Djelfa

city in Algeria. In order to consider the effect of the
different meteorological parameters on daily global solar
radiation

prediction,

four

following

input features are considered:

T and Vx.

2)

1)

combinations

of

Day of the year, Go, So,

Day of the year, Go, So, T, P and Vx.

of the year, Go, So, T, H , P and Vx.

4)

3)

Day

Day of the year,

Go, So, T, H and Vx. These models were compared using

three evaluation criteria: Mean square error (MSE),
mean absolute error (MAE), and root mean square
error

(RMSE).

The

results

show

that

the

two

parameters: atmospheric pressure and relative humidity

affect the prediction output of global solar radiation. In
addition, the results show that the relative humidity is
the most important features influencing the prediction
performance. It can be concluded that fourth model can
be used for forecasting daily global solar radiation in

Nevertheless, these data are not always available, especially

in isolated areas. Accordingly, predicting solar radiation
values is often the only practical way to acquire these data.
This is because measured sequences of radiation values are
available only for a few locations or regions in each country
[1 ].
We can classify the solar prediction models in two main
classes. First group are stochastic models such as AR (auto
regressive), ARMA (AR-moving average), ARIMA (AR
integrated MA). These models are based essentially on the
probability estimation, which do not always give good
generalization for the unseen data. We can cite as an
example: M. Salmi et al.[2], J. Almorox et al.[3]
Korachagaon et al.[4]. Second categories of solar prediction
models: artificial neural network (ANN) models which are
used to learn the behavior of a system and therefore predict
unseen data.
In general, an artificial neural network (ANN) provides a
computationally efficient approach for determining an
empirical, probably nonlinear relationship between a number
of inputs and one or more outputs. In the literature, several
models based on ANN approach have been proposed in order
to predict the global solar radiation data, we can cite here:

artificial

AI-Alawi and AI-Hinai [5], used location parameters,

month, and averages of: pressure, temperature, vapor
pressure, relative humidity, wind speed and sunshine
duration as inputs into artificial neural network (ANN)
models to predict global solar radiation and achieved an
accuracy of 7.3% as MAPE.

Solar energy is one of the oldest renewable sources in the

world; it is freely available and could be easily harnessed to
reduce reliance on hydrocarbon-based energy. Solar
radiation data play very important role in designing, sizing
and performance of energy and renewable energy systems.

Sozen et al. [6], used a neural network for the prediction

of solar potential based on geographical coordinates
(latitude, longitude and altitude), meteorological data
(sunshine duration and mean temperature) and the
corresponding month as inputs of the network. The authors

other locations in Algeria.

Keywords-

Global

solar

radiation,

modelling,

neural network models (ANN), climatic parameters.

I.

INTRODUCTION

978-1-4799-2516-2/14/$31.00 2014 IEEE

found that the maximum mean absolute percentage error is

less than 6.7% and a correlation coefficient about 99.89% for
the testing stations.
In two different works, Mohandes et al. used latitude,
longitude, altitude and sunshine duration as inputs of multi
layer perceptron and radial basis function neural networks in
order to predict GSR for 41 stations in Saudi Arabia [7,8].
The average MAPE for the multi-layer perceptron network
was 12.61% while this value was 1 0.09% for radial basis
function neural networks network.
These works and others have been shown that ANN
models are usually more efficient and less time consuming in
modeling complex systems. A good and rich review of
Artificial Intelligence technique for modeling and forecasting
of solar radiation data has been reported by Mellit [1].

[tleulity fUlJI.:tiOI1

GSR

'-v---'

-----'
One or more
ludden (flyer

[npnt layer

'-v---'
OUqlllf layer

Figure I.

Building block of
a multi- layer perceptron neural network

This study presents the use of an artificial neural

networks (multi-layer perceptron) for modeling and
predicting daily global solar radiation on a horizontal
surface, using meteorological parameters (mean daily
extraterrestrial solar radiation intensity Go, The maximum
possible sunshine hours So, mean daily relative humidity,
mean daily air temperature T, mean daily atmospheric
pressure P and wind speed Vx) and to study the influence of
these parameters on this prediction performance for Djelfa
city in Algeria.

In the neuron of the output layer, other transfer function

can be used; for instance, the identity function (simple linear
activation) can be used for regression problems. The MLP
neural networks are trained by the error back-propagation
(EBP) algorithm, optimized according to a predefined
criterion [9]. The weights of the connections are adjusted
during the training process to achieve the desired
input/output relation of the network.

The organization of the paper is as follows. In Section 2,

the proposed Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is presented.
And discussed, section 3 describes the data used in the
experiments, section 4 presents the experimental results and
discussions and section 5 concludes this paper.

In this study, the daily data of: mean values of the global
solar radiation on horizontal surface G, mean daily relative
humidity H, mean daily air temperature T, mean daily
atmospheric pressure P and wind speed Vx, were provided by
the Algerian Meteorological Office from Djelfa city Algeria
(Latitude 34.68N, Longitude 3.25E, Altitude 1126 (m)) for
a period of five years (2001-2005), were applied for
forecasting daily global solar radiation using ANN for the
four input configurations. 1095 days of the whole dataset
(from january 2001 to december 2003) were used for the
learning process, while 365 days (2004) were used for
validation and the rest of the data 1 98 days (2005) were used
to test the predicting ability of the proposed models. It can be
noted that, the testing data were not applied during the
building of the different neural networks models. It should be
pointed out that, limited by the available data source, only
one site of experimental data were used to validate the
proposed models.

II.

ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK

A multi-layer perceptron neural network is composed of

a number of highly interconnected units (neurons)
functioning in parallel and organized in layers with a feed
forward information flow.
The architecture of the multi-layer perceptron is
organized in this manner (see Figure 1): the signals flow
successively throughout the different layers from the input to
the output layer. The intermediary layers are called hidden
layers. For each layer, each elementary unit calculates a
scalar product between a vector of weights and the output
vector given by the previous layer. A transfer function is
then performed to the result to make an input for the next
layer.
A general transfer function for the hidden layers is the
sigmoidal function:

!(x) =

__
__

+exp(-x)

(1)

III.

DATABASE

The values of the extraterrestrial radiation, Go and the

day length So were calculated from the following equations:
24

Go

- 10 (1 +
1<

21<
360n
0.033 cos - )(cos;! cos osin OJ + - wsin;! sin 0)
W

(2)

Where 10 is the solar constant equal to 1367 wm-2, A is

the latitude, () is the solar declination and w is the mean
sunrise hour angle for the month, can be obtained from
S

23.45[sin
-

co s

360(284 + n)

(-

365
tan 4 tan

c5)

2
So

-w

1 5

(3)
Before using the data, first, the data was subjected to
quality checks and was normalized in the range 0.0-1.0 by a
linear function, and then returned to original values after the
prediction procedure.
IV.

EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS A ND

DISCUSSION

For assessing the influence of meteorological parameters

especially: relative humidity, air temperature, atmospheric
pressure and wind speed on daily global solar radiation
prediction, four following combinations of input variables
are considered:

Different architectures were tested. Such architectures

were obtained by varying:
(i) The number hidden layers (1 ,2 or more).
(ii) The number of hidden neurons in each hidden layer
(from 1 to 50).
After designing the four models, their performance on
unseen data has to be assessed. Different error criteria have
been proposed and used in the literature, but no single error
criterion has been proved to be the general standard. The
error criteria considered in this paper are: mean square error
MSE mean absolute error MAE and root mean square error
RMSE.

(1) Day of the year, mean daily extraterrestrial solar

radiation intensity Go, maximum possible sunshine hours So,
daily mean air temperature and wind speed as inputs and
daily GSR as output.
(2) Day of the year, daily mean daily extraterrestrial solar
radiation intensity Go, maximum possible sunshine hours So,
daily mean air temperature, atmospheric pressure and wind
speed as inputs and daily GSR as output.
(3) Day of the year, daily mean daily extraterrestrial solar
radiation intensity Go, maximum possible sunshine hours So,
daily mean air temperature, relative humidity and wind speed
as inputs and daily GSR as output.
(4) Day of the year, daily mean daily extraterrestrial solar
radiation intensity Go, maximum possible sunshine hours So,
daily mean air temperature, atmospheric pressure, relative
humidity and wind speed as inputs and daily GSR as output.
In this work, the whole dataset was partitioned into three
sets: training set, validation set and test set. The validation
set is used to select the best network architecture which has
the optimal number of neurons in the hidden layer, while the
testing set is used to test the generalization performance of
the network and is not seen by any individual networks
during the training and validating processes.
For this type of ANNs, Levenberg Marquardt back
propagation algorithm (LM) was used for the four models.
Neurons in the input layer have no transfer function. Logistic
sigmoid transfer function (Iogsig) and linear transfer function
(purelin) were used in the hidden layers and output layer of
the network as an activation function, respectively.
The weights of the connections between neurons are
tuned so as to get the desired input/output relationship of the
network. This procedure goes on until the difference
between the output of the network and the desired output is
equal to a predefined threshold error.
Here, the criterion is stopped as the network output
which should be closer to the value of desired output. This
training procedure has to be repeated for the rest of the
input-output pairs existing in the training data.

MSE

L Gim
I

- Gi,c

l)

/ N

(3)

(4)
RMSE

N
[L (Gi m
'
1

12

- Gi , c)

N] t

(5)

Where N is the number of test samples, Gi,m and Gi,c are

the measured and estimated values of global radiation
respectively.
Table 1 presents the optimal architecture found for each
model and the statistical comparison of the different
proposed models by using the three error criteria.
TABLE I.
Model

ARCHITECTURE OF EACH ANN MODEL AND THE

CORRESPONDING STATISTICAL ERRORS
ANN

MSE

MAE

RMSE

architecture
1

5x4x3xl

0.0343

0.1492

0.1852

6x2x4xl

0,0] 75

0.1059

0.1323

6x2x3xl

0.0162

0.0973

0.1273

7x3x2xl

0.0137

0.0909

0.1169

As it can be seen from table I and figures 2-5, good

correlation between predicted and measured GSR signals.
However, for different input architectures, it was found that
the best performance is obtained by the fourth model
according to the three different error criteria. The obtained
error performances were 0.11 69 for RMSE, 0.0909 when
using MAE and 0.0137 for MSE criterion.
All meteorological and climatological parameters have
an influence on the estimation of global solar radiation, but
this influence varies from one parameter to another. For the
site Djelfa, this study allows to order the parameters
according to their influence as follows: extraterrestrial solar
radiation, air temperature, wind speed, relative humidity
[mally the atmospheric pressure.

40t;======;--,

These results prove that the effect of relative humidity is

most important and influencing than atmospheric pressure.
It was discovered that, different inputs and learning rates, as
well as model structures, directly influence the prediction
accuracy. Even with the same data set from a specific site,
the choice of best-performing model may not be the same
with different evaluation criteria.

:1

30

ANN Modell

Figure5 .

c
o

Figure 2 .

40

60

80

100
120
Day althe year

140

160

180

201

Predicted and
measured GSR on testing data using model I

40 rr=
---

====-r---r----'-----,

Meseaured GSR
Model 2

ANN

c:

.
..

20

'"

(5

III

ftj

.Q
o

(5
--'
----'.L..
----'
..J.
.L ..
-'- .L
- J....
- .L..
0 L8 0 -2O (
2O - 40- 60- 810 0- 120- 14O- 1
60
0
- 1
-

Day

Figure 3.

of the

-,-

--,-

-,--

100
120
Day of the year

140

160

180

ANN Model 4

40

60

year

Predicted and
measured GSR on testing data using model 2

80

200

Predicted and
measured GSR on testing data using model 4

v.

20

20

---,

---T

Meseaured GSR

20

"iii

==

25

40 F===========--.--.--'--.--r--r---,
-- Meoeaured GSR
--

==

30

In the following, the measured and predicted values of

the mean daily global solar radiation for the various models
are illustrated in figures 2-5.

--,-

35

CONCULSION

Predicting future value of solar radiation at isolated sites

is challenging. This paper proposed a set of ANN models
for global solar radiation prediction at Djelfa, Algeria.
Numerous ANN architectures with different input features
were developed. The successful results reported in the paper
were accomplished in several steps. First, a normalization
process was applied to input data. Second, training and
validation were performed to choose the best ANN
architecture according to each input configuration. Third,
for the testing data the most suitable algorithm for building
a global solar radiation prediction model was identified and
applied.
The computational results reported in the paper
confirmed that the model configuration with the following
input features: day of the year, daily mean daily
extraterrestrial solar radiation intensity Go, maximum
possible sunshine hours So, daily mean air temperature,
relative humidity, atmospheric pressure and wind speed
produced accurate prediction performance that can be used
for other locations in Algeria.
The models obtained in this work can be used in
designing and estimating the performance of solar systems

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

----'.L.. .L
OL-.L.. - - .L - - ...L ----'---'
1 '--1 '- - - 6 O - 8
,
8
2O
20
20 0
0
0
10 0
60
1
40
40

The authors would like to thank the National Office of

Meteorology N.O.M Dar el Beida Algiers for providing the
meteorological data.
REFERENCES

Day of the year

Figure 4.

Predicted and
measured GSR on testing data using model 3

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[3]

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[7]

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[4]

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