Fundamentals for Defining Climate-Based Solar Metrics

Abstract

When designing solar control devices and estimating their benefit, long-term solar radiation records are rarely available. Therefore theoretical models are often used, which disregard cloud cover, or standard climate files that flatten year-to-year climate differences and only provide results with hourly resolution. The objective was to calculate shading with greater realism, and to do so, the Grasshopper platform and Global Radiation records were used, which in the case of Medellín, Colombia, have been collected every minute since 2017. With these multi-year data, a theoretical model that serves as a Reference function was calibrated, and the lags between the EPW files available for the city and five meteorological stations were quantified. The conclusion was that it was possible to calculate solar metrics from meteorological records and the uncertainty behind the theoretical radiation models was reduced.