Investigation of the effect of weather conditions on solar radiation in Brunei Darussalam

Abstract

The amount of solar radiation received on the earth's surface is known to be highly influenced by the weather conditions and the geography of a particular area. This paper presents some results of an investigation that was carried out to find the effects of weather patterns on the solar radiation in Brunei Darussalam, a small country that experiences equatorial climate due to its geographical location. Weather data were collected at a suitable location in the University Brunei Darussalam (UBD) and were compared with the available data provided by the Brunei Darussalam Meteorological Services (BDMS). It has been found that the solar radiation is directly proportional to the atmospheric temperature while it is inversely proportional to the relative humidity. It has also been found that wind speed has little influence on solar radiation. Functional relationships between the solar radiation and the atmospheric temperature, and between the solar radiation and the relative humidity have also been developed from the BDMS weather data. Finally, an artificial neural network (ANN) model has been developed for training and testing the solar radiation data with the inputs of temperature and relative humidity, and a coefficient of determination of around 99% was achieved. This set of data containing all the aforementioned results may serve as a guideline on the solar radiation pattern in the geographical areas around the equator.

Keywords:

• solar energy
• temperature
• relative humidity
• wind speed
• ANN
• correlation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge Geoffrey Vun Yong An, Jonathan Wong Teck Kee and Mohd. Azizan Bin Ghani for their time in collecting the required data at the Core. The assistance of Hjh. Saidah Hj. Mirasan, senior meteorological-observer, Brunei Darussalam Meteorological Services (BDMS) is highly appreciated for her positive cooperation in obtaining the weather data. Also, the authors would like to thank all the anonymous reviewers and Professor K. McIsaac (University of Western Ontario, Canada) for their valuable suggestions in improving the quality of this paper.