EVALUATION OF SOLAR RADIATION ESTIMATED FROM HIMAWARI-8 SATELLITE OVER VIETNAM REGION

Abstract

The development of Solar energy system is growing rapidly in Vietnam in recent years by encouragement of the Government in renewable energy. Requirement for accurate knowledge of the solar radiation reaching the surface is increasingly important in the successful deployment of Solar photovoltaic plants. However, measurements of different components of solar resources including direct normal irradiance (DNI) and global horizontal irradiance (GHI) are limited to few stations over whole country. Satellite imagery provides an ability to monitor the surface radiation over large areas at high spatial and temporal resolution as alternatives at low cost. Observations from the new Japanese geostationary satellite Himawari-8 produce imagery covering Asia-Pacific region, permitting estimation of GHI and DNI over Vietnam at 10-minute temporal resolution. However, accurate comparisons with ground observations are essential to assess their uncertainty. In this study, we evaluated the Himawari-8 radiation product AMATERASS provided by JST/CREST TEEDDA using observations recorded at 5 stations in different regions of Vietnam. The result shows good agreement between satellite estimation and observed data with high correlation of range 0.92-0.94, but better in clear-sky episodes.Because of AMATERASS outperform, we used it for validating ERA-Interim reanalysis in the spatial scale. The comparison was made dividedly for 7 climate zones and 4 seasons. The conclusion is that ERA-Interim is also well associated with satellite-based estimates in seasonal trend for all season, but in average the reanalysis has negative bias towards satellite estimates. This underestimation is more pronounced in the months of JJA and SON periods and in the north part of Vietnam because of unpredicted cloud in the ERA reanalysis.