Studies on the Improvement of Modelled Solar Radiation and the Attenuation Effect of Aerosol Using the Wrf-Solar Model with Satellite-Based Aod Data Over North China

Photovoltaic (PV) power generation will become one of the main energy sources to achieve goals of carbon peak and carbon-neutral in China in the future. However, serious haze events have occurred frequently due to massive anthropogenic emissions in winter in China and resulted in a significant reduction of solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface. In this study, we conducted modifications to modelled solar radiation with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF)-Solar model by implementing the satellite-based aerosol optical depth (AOD) data into the model in winter of 2016/2017 over North China. The satellite-based AOD data have a higher spatial resolution and better accuracy. Simulated errors of Global horizontal irradiance (GHI) decrease remarkably compared with those excluding the AOD data. RMSE and MAE of simulated GHI under three types of weather conditions declined by more than 20%, 37%, respectively. Mean reduction ratios of GHI corresponding to five grades of haze range between 19% and 30%, and increase with PM 2.5 concentrations. Our results show that direct application of the satellite-based AOD data into the WRF-Solar model is very effective for improving the simulation of solar radiation and investigating aerosol radiative effects in winter