A Simple Statistical Model to Estimate Incident Solar Radiation at the Surface from NOAA AVHRR Satellite Data

Processing of meteorological satellite image data provides a wealth of information useful in earth surface and environmental applications. Particularly, it is important for the estimation of different parameters of surface energy budget. In this work, a method has been developed to estimation of hourly incoming solar radiation on the surface of Bangladesh using NOAA-AVHRR satellite digital images. The model is based on the statistical regressions between the ground truth and satellite estimated values. Hundreds of full resolution images (1.1 km) for two months of the year have been processed using ERDAS IMAGINE software. Ground solar global irradiation for one place has been estimated for two months through this application. The efficiency of this method for calculating surface insolation has been checked by estimating the relative deviation between the estimated Irradiation and measured Irradiation. The method can be used for calculation of hourly irradiation over areas in a tropical environment.