Spatial mapping of short-term solar radiation prediction incorporating geostationary satellite images coupled with deep convolutional LSTM networks for South Korea

A practical approach to continuously monitor and provide real-time solar energy prediction can help support reliable renewable energy supply and relevant energy security systems. In this study on the Korean Peninsula, contemporaneous solar radiation images obtained from the Communication, Ocean and Meteorological Satellite (COMS) Meteorological Imager (MI) system, were used to design a convolutional neural network and a long short-term memory network predictive model, ConvLSTM. This model was applied to predict one-hour ahead solar radiation and spatially map solar energy potential. The newly designed ConvLSTM model enabled reliable prediction of solar radiation, incorporating spatial changes in atmospheric conditions and capturing the temporal sequence-to-sequence variations that are likely to influence solar driven power supply and its overall stability. Results showed that the proposed ConvLSTM model successfully captured cloud-induced variations in ground level solar radiation when compared with reference images from a physical model. A comparison with ground pyranometer measurements indicated that the short-term prediction of global solar radiation by the proposed ConvLSTM had the highest accuracy [root mean square error (RMSE) = 83.458 Wcenterdotm−2, mean bias error (MBE) = 4.466 Wcenterdotm−2, coefficient of determination (R2) = 0.874] when compared with results of conventional artificial neural network (ANN) [RMSE = 94.085 Wcenterdotm−2, MBE = −6.039 Wcenterdotm−2, R2 = 0.821] and random forest (RF) [RMSE = 95.262 Wcenterdotm−2, MBE = −11.576 Wcenterdotm−2, R2 = 0.839] models. In addition, ConvLSTM better captured the temporal variations in predicted solar radiation, mainly due to cloud attenuation effects when compared with two selected ground stations. The study showed that contemporaneous satellite images over short-term or near real-time intervals can successfully support solar energy exploration in areas without continuous environmental monitoring systems, where satellite footprints are available to model and monitor solar energy management systems supporting real-life power grid systems