Solar Global Horizontal Irradiance (GHI) fluctuates on both short (seconds to hours) and long (days to months) time scales leading to variability of power produced by solar photovoltaic (PV) systems. Under a high PV penetration scenario, fluctuations on short time scales may require a supplementary spinning power source that can be ramped quickly, adding significant external cost to PV operatio...

Recent avalanche models of solar flare occurrence which consider the magnetised solar atmosphere to be in a state of self-organised criticality have concentrated mainly on the magnetic field as the means by which individual energy release sites communicate with neighbouring sites. This, however, neglects the possibility of remote triggering of energy release via fast particles. In this paper we...

Solar radiation directly and indirectly drives a variety of ecosystem processes. Our aim was to evaluate how tree canopy architecture affects near-ground, incoming solar radiation along gradients of increasing tree cover, referred to as the grassland–forest continuum. We evaluated a common type of canopy architecture: tall trees that generally have their lowest level of foliage high above, rath...

1 University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1; {a22naray, ponnu}@uwaterloo.ca 6 2 University of Massachusetts Lowell, Massachusetts, USA 01854; [email protected] 7 * Correspondence: [email protected], Tel.: +1-519-888-4567 x31450 8 Abstract: Investments in wind and solar power are driven by the aim to maximize the utilization of 9 renewable energy (RE). This results in an increas...

Solar radiation is a critical variable in global change sciences. While most of the current global datasets provide only the total downward solar radiation, we aim to develop a method to estimate the downward global land surface solar radiation and its partitioned direct and diffuse components, which provide the necessary key meteorological inputs for most land surface models. We developed a si...

It has been suggested that a manned mission to Mars be launched at solar maximum rather than at solar minimum to minimize the radiation exposure to galactic cosmic rays. It is true that the number of hits from highly ionizing particles to critical regions in the brain will be less at solar maximum, and it is of interest to estimate how much less. We present here calculations for several sites w...

Solar installation sites must be chosen carefully in order to maximize return on investment for green energy projects. Given a database containing 27 potential sites in Arizona, we present a method for ranking them in order of their optimality. Three models of optimality, or score, are evaluated, where each is a function of solar panel efficiency, availability of solar resource and confidence i...

Photoelectrochemical (PEC) conversion of solar light into chemical fuels is one of the most promising solutions to the challenge of sustainable energy. Graphitic carbon (IV) nitride polymer (g-CN) is an interesting sustainable photocathode material due to low-cost, visible-light sensitivity, and chemical stability up to 500 °C in air. However, grain boundary effects and limited active sites gre...

This paper describes a flexible approach to short term prediction of meteorological variables. In particular, we focus on the prediction of the solar irradiance one hour ahead, a task that has high practical value when optimizing solar energy resources. As Défi EGC 2018 provides us with time series data for multiple sensors (e.g. solar irradiance, temperature, hygrometry), recorded every minute...