The main objectives of this work are to address the analysis of the spatial and temporal variability of the ratio between photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) and global horizontal irradiance (GHI), as well as to develop PAR models. The analysis was carried out using data from three stations located in mainland Spain covering three climates: oceanic, standard Mediterranean, and continental Mediterranean. The results of this analysis showed a clear dependence between the PAR/GHI ratio and the location; the oceanic climate showed higher values of PAR/GHI compared with Mediterranean climates. Further, the temporal variability of PAR/GHI was conditioned by the variability of clearness index, so it was also higher in oceanic than in Mediterranean climates. On the other hand, Climate Monitoring Satellite Facility (CM-SAF) and Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data were used to estimate PAR as a function of GHI over the whole territory. The validation with ground measurements showed better performance of the MODIS-estimates-derived model for the oceanic climate (root-mean-square error (RMSE) around 5%), while the model obtained from CM-SAF fitted better for Mediterranean climates (RMSEs around 2%).
Photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) is a useful variable to estimate the growth of biomass or microalgae. However, it is not always feasible to access PAR measurements; in this work, two sets of nine hourly PAR models were developed. These models were estimated for mainland Spain from satellite data, using multilinear regressions and artificial neural networks. The variables utilized were combinations of global horizontal irradiance, clearness index, solar zenith angle cosine, relative humidity, and air temperature. The study territory was divided into regions with similar features regarding PAR through clustering of the PAR clearness index (kPAR). This methodology allowed PAR modeling for the two main climatic regions in mainland Spain (Oceanic and Mediterranean). MODIS 3 h data were employed to train the models, and PAR data registered in seven stations across Spain were used for validation. Usual validation indices assess the extent to which the models reproduce the observed data. However, none of those indices considers the exceedance probabilities, which allow the assessment of the viability of projects based on the data to be modeled. In this work, a new validation index based on these probabilities is presented. Hence, its use, along with the other indices, provides a double and thus more complete validation.
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