estimating solar radiation with ordinary meteorological data in mashhad

one of the most main head in governments is to achieve the energy for their countries. as the fossil sources are at their ends and also they cause greenhouse emission and environment pollution, shifting to renewable sources of energy is an indispensable alternative for most countries. the sun is the most important renewable energy source. to assessment reachable solar radiation in mashhad from the ordinary meteorological data via artificial neural network (ann), a survey has been conducted. results showed that the ann with six variable inputs as daily mean temperature, daily relative humidity, daily sunshine duration, daily extraterrestrial radiation, number of day in the year and daily dry temperature, with two hidden layer included 37 and 18 neurons respectively, had a good estimation with a high accuracy for solar radiation. measured r, mae, mse and rmse were 0.9533, 1.4391, 4.1790 and 2.0443, respectively. therefore in mashhad and also the regions with similar climate to mashhad, that there is no opportunity to submit the solar radiation data, we can use ordinary meteorological data, as mentioned above, to estimate the solar radiation with a high and acceptable accuracy.