Evaluation of hourly tilted surface radiation models

This study investigates the performance of the isotropic and four anisotropic hourly tilted surface radiation models by using monthly average hourly utilizable energy as a standard of measure. Utilizable energy is the radiation above a specified threshold level. Differences between the utilizable energy measured and the utilizable energy predicted are observed for various surface slope/azimuth orientations and critical radiation levels. Normalized root mean square difference and normalized mean bias difference statistics are formed to quantify the ability of each model to estimate the utilizable energy on a tilted surface. The influence of horizontal diffuse radiation on tilted surface model performance is examined by comparing the predicted utilizable energy on a tilted surface using both measured horizontal diffuse and estimated horizontal diffuse found from diffuse fraction correlations. On an overall basis, the isotropic sky model showed the poorest performance and is not recommended for estimating the hourly radiation on a tilted surface. The anisotropic models have comparable performance to each other. There was no significant degradation of tilted surface model performance when the diffuse radiation is estimated from a diffuse fraction correlation rather than obtained from measurements.