Developing a Thailand solar irradiance map using Himawari-8 satellite imageries and deep learning models

This paper presents an online platform that shows Thailand's solar irradiance map every 30 minutes. It is available at https://www.cusolarforecast.com. The methodology for estimating global horizontal irradiance (GHI) across Thailand relies on cloud index extracted from Himawari-8 satellite imagery, Ineichen clear-sky model with locally-tuned Linke turbidity, and machine learning models. The methods take clear-sky irradiance, cloud index, re-analyzed GHI and temperature data from the MERRA-2 database, and date-time as inputs for GHI estimation models, including LightGBM, LSTM, Informer, and Transformer. These are benchmarked with the estimate from the SolCast service by evaluation of 15-minute ground GHI data from 53 ground stations over 1.5 years during 2022-2023. The results show that the four models have competitive performances and outperform the SolCast service. The best model is LightGBM, with an MAE of 78.58 W/sqm and RMSE of 118.97 W/sqm. Obtaining re-analyzed MERRA-2 data for Thailand is not economically feasible for deployment. When removing these features, the Informer model has a winning performance of 78.67 W/sqm in MAE. The obtained performance aligns with existing literature by taking the climate zone and time granularity of data into consideration. As the map shows an estimate of GHI over 93,000 grids with a frequent update, the paper also describes a computational framework for displaying the entire map. It tests the runtime performance of deep learning models in the GHI estimation process.