Author : Mostafa Fatahi, Farzaneh Sasanpour, Mohammad Saligheh, Mohammad Soleimani and Zahra Sonboli

This study aims to spatially analyze the insolation in Iran region. Insolation data are gathered from of Atmospheric Science Data Center of NASA – SSE data set. In this study, interpolation methods are used to spatially analyze the monthly, seasonal, and annual insolation. In this study various method such as IDW, RBF (completely regularize spline, spline with tension, multiquadric, inverse multiquadric, thin plate spline) and simple kriging (spherical, circular, exponential, Gaussian) are evaluated through cross validation. Next, the methods that predict the insolation with less error are verified by applying RMSE. The results reveal that RBF predicts the amounts of monthly, seasonal, and annual insolation with higher precision. The results, after applying the spatial analysis, reveal that in Iran region the southwest, south, and parts of the center receive the highest levels of annual insolation. These regions also show the lowest coefficient of variation. The lowest levels of insolation and the highest coefficient of variation are recorded for north and parts of northwest.

Keywords: Renewable energy, Solar energy, Insolation, Spatial analysis, Interpolation methods

Article published in International Journal of Current Engineering and Technology, Vol.7, No.3 (June-2017)