Validation of Msg Derived Surface Incoming Global Short-wave Radiation Products over Belgium

Appropriate information on solar resources is very important for a variety of technological areas, such as: agriculture, meteorology, forestry engineering, water resources and in particular in the designing, sizing and monitoring of solar energy systems. Solar radiation is observed by means of networks of meteorological stations. However, the availability of observed solar radiation measurements has proven to be spatially and temporally inadequate for many applications. Only space-based observations can deliver a global coverage of the global irradiation impinging on horizontal surface at the ground level. Because only geostationary data allow to capture the diurnal cycle of the solar irradiance at the Earth’s surface, we evaluate in the present study if MSG derived surface incoming global short-wave radiation could valuably complement the in situ solar measurements network of the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium and thereby improving the spatio-temporal distribution of the surface incoming global solar radiation over Belgium. Down-welling short-wave radiation at the Earth’s surface operationally retrieved from MSG imageries by the Land Surface Analysis Satellite Applications Facility (LSA-SAF) and the Satellite Application Facility on Climate Monitoring (CM-SAF) were evaluated over Belgium together with an upgraded formulation of the Heliosat surface global irradiance retrieval scheme proposed by MeteoSwiss in the framework of CM-SAF. Two years (2008 and 2009) of ground based and satellite retrieved data have been intensively compared in order to determine the best suited satellite derived radiation product over Belgium.